Linux/Python Issues

[Paul Boddie]

On 17 Feb, 20:38, MartinRineh... at gmail.com wrote:
> I went to Python.org, DL'd Python 2.5 source code per the usual
> inadequate instructions and ran the make files successfully (sort of).
> Python 2.5 works fine. But "from Tkinter import *" gets a "What's
> Tkinter?" message. IDLE's no where to be found.

It could be that you don't have the Tcl/Tk libraries installed, or
perhaps the header files for Tcl/Tk aren't installed. If so, Python
wouldn't detect them when being configured itself, and then you
probably wouldn't have the Tkinter extension installed.

> What's not in the instructions is what directory should I be in when I
> download? Where should I put the ".bz2" file? What dir for running the
> make files? At present I'm working on a Windows machine, endangering
> what's left of my sanity.
>
> I'm using Linspire, so Debian directories are probably the ones that
> will get me up and running. Barring specific knowledge, even some good
> guesses would be appreciated.

Here's one page which probably tells you stuff you already know:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Download

On Ubuntu, which is Debian-based, the python-tk package should make
Tkinter available, so you could look for that in your repositories. As
for building from source, you can put the .bz2 file anywhere, and
unpack it anywhere that isn't going to make a mess for you to clean up
later. For example, you could download the Python .bz2 file into a
"downloads" directory residing in your home directory, then you could
do this:

mkdir software
cd software
tar jxf ~/downloads/Python-2.5.1.tar.bz2
cd Python-2.5.1
./configure
make

You can then do a "make install" with the right privileges.

Paul