finding packages: Tkinter vs. python-tk

[Peter Teuben]

One of my frustrations, perhaps as a newcomer to Ubuntu (from fedora),
is the amount of packages
I need to install to get my development going. I used to just say in 
fedora, i was
a developer, and most of the stuff was just there.   Very little to add.
In ubuntu, you get gcc, but no g++ or gfortran, and that's just the 
start. I tried
a DVD version this weekend, but still had to install a long long list.  
Is there
a shortcut to this, i didn't see anything in the installation procedure.


As an example of the frustration:

Today, I needed tkinter in one of my applications.  The "Ubuntu Software 
Center" found
no match for tkinter (in IDLE , but that didn't pan out into something 
useful).
In the end, i found it as an option under"python-tk", but why didn't the 
search in
that U.S.C find it?

On the command line I found it via

                      dpkg -l | grep -i tkinter



why is this common procedure not debugged (or has it been regressed) 
after so many
versions?

peter