page = requests.get(url)
tree = html.fromstring(page.text)
At line 2 I get:
AttributeError: \'Response\' object has no attribute \'text
You are using an ancient version of requests, most likely because it came installed with Ubuntu Precise Pengolin (12.04LTS).
You'll either have to refer to the version specific documentation or use a more recent version. requests has changed drastically since the 0.x version days.
For your old version, if you set response.encoding, response.content will contain a decoded Unicode value.