IDLE not working on RedHat 9

[Martin v. Löwis]

djw <dwelch91 at no.spam.attbi.com> writes:

> I was going to ask about this myself - is this typical on a Linux
> distro to not have tkinter installed? I was hoping to be able to use
> Tk as the "lowest common denominator" UI when I could not count on Qt
> or GTK, etc.  Apparently, that's not the case? Is there any way to
> reliably get a UI up on Linux without having to ship one?

No. Some systems will have gtk installed, others have Qt, and some Tk
(all possibly with additional libraries on top of these). You can be
reasonably sure that X11 is available. The lowest common denominator
is still a terminal window.

That said, you also can be sure that systems *ship* with Tkinter. So
if you distribute RPMs, you can add dependencies to the Tkinter
library (unfortunately, dependencies have to be named differently for
different distributions); with that, you can clue the administrator
that additional packages are needed, and that he has to fetch his
distribution DVD.

Regards,
Martin