Install tkinter and the Python interpreter locally

Question

I work with Linux on a service. And I don't have the root privilege. I installed the python-3.2.3 locally to "/home/sam/install_sam". when I import the tkinter module. I get the following error:

ImportError: No module named _tkinter, please install the python-tk package

I know I need to install the Tkinter module. Because I don't have the root privilege. I can't use like the following commands:

apt-get install python-tk
sudo apt-get install python-tk

And I search on Google. I get tcl/tk from here. I install them use the following commands.

cd ~/Downloads/tcl8.5.11/unix
./configure --prefix=/home/sam/install_sam/tcl
make
make install

cd ~/Downloads/tk8.5.11/unix
./configure --prefix=/home/sam/install_sam/tk
            --with- tcl=/home/sam/Downloads/tcl8.5.11/unix
make
make install

cd ~/Downloads/Python3.2.3/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/sam/install_sam/tcl/lib:/home/sam/install_sam/tk/lib
export LD_RUN_PATH=/home/sam/install_sam/tcl/lib:/home/sam/install_sam/tk/lib
./configure --prefix=/home/sam/install_sam/python
make
make install

I still got an error: INFO: Can't locate Tcl/Tk libs and/or headers. How should I configure the tcl/tk for the Python interpreter?

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-07-13 20:19:17Z

7

Use CPPFLAGS environment variable to set the include directories for Tcl ("tcl") and Tkinter ("tk") before building Python 3. This has worked for me.

export CPPFLAGS="-I/home/sam/install_sam/tcl/include -I/home/sam/install_sam/tk/include"

edited Jul 13 at 20:19

Peter Mortensen

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answered Nov 27, 2012 at 0:14

iaswtw

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Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-07-13 20:17:08Z

7

Finally. I install tcl/tk and the Python executable in on the same path. It can work now. The commands are as follow:

cd ~/Downloads/tcl8.5.11/unix
./configure --prefix=/home/sam/install_sam/python3
make
make install

cd ~/Downloads/tk8.5.11/unix
./configure --prefix=/home/sam/install_sam/python3
            --with-tcl=/home/sam/Downloads/tcl8.5.11/unix
make
make install

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/sam/install_sam/python3/lib
cd ~/Downloads/Python3.2.3/3
./configure --prefix=/home/sam/install_sam/python3
make
make install

edited Jul 13 at 20:17

Peter Mortensen

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answered Aug 29, 2012 at 8:58

Samuel

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Comments

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-07-13 20:20:41Z

2

Use:

sudo apt-get install tcl-dev tk-dev

It worked for me, although I ended up pulling a Docker image and using that instead.

edited Jul 13 at 20:20

Peter Mortensen

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answered Oct 4, 2017 at 13:09

Den-Jason

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1 Comment

Yonatan Simson Over a year ago

Worked for me. Though I had to recompile and re-install python again. I compiled python3,7 from source in Ubuntu16.04 since deadsnakes is no longer supported

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-07-28 20:14:49Z

1

For CentOS, this is:

yum install -y tcl-devel tk-devel

It worked on CentOS 7.

In general, I find that where RHEL has *-dev, CentOS has *-devel.

edited Jul 28 at 20:14

Peter Mortensen

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answered May 30, 2022 at 15:30

FSCKur

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Comments

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-07-28 20:13:35Z

In my case, I had import tkinter properly working on my Python 3 environment, but I had to use a precompiled Python with its own environment (Blender, FYI) that didn't include the dependencies (I needed tkinter to run matplotlib).

The fix in my case was very simple:

In the working python, import tkinter and check where it is installed with tkinter.__file__. This will be something like path/to/site-packages/tkinter
Copy the tkinter folder into the site-packages of your target installation
Then import _tkinter won't work. Again using the file trick, locate the missing .so file. In my Ubuntu installation, it was something like `path/to/python3.7/lib-dynload/_tkinter.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
Again, copy the .so file into the corresponding lib-dynload of your target installation. Make sure that both origin and target Python versions are compatible.

To make sure that your target Python interpreter finds the copied files, and make sure that the destination paths are listed under sys.path.

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