@ricknta Make sure the fastai virtualenv is active before you install new packages, otherwise you won’t be able to import them inside the fastai kernel (run source activate fastai before pip install [package] or conda install [package]).
fyi conda update fastai can fail because of incompatibilities with other packages, but conda doesn’t report any problems by default. To see why conda update fastai won’t install the latest version of fastai activate the fastai virtualenv & try running conda install -c fastai fastai==1.0.15 (specify the exact version). As this isn’t specific to Salamander this thread is probably the best place to report anything you discover & get further help with upgrading fastai.