Can't create a pyspark interactive session using livy in spark 2.0.X

I tried to run an interactive pyspark session using spark 2.0.1 and i failed:
the session state was in "starting" for a long time and then went directly to "died" (or "died" equivalent since i don't remember the exact string)

I was able to run successfully a pyspark batch job againt spark 2.0.1 using the same livy installation.