finding packages: Tkinter vs. python-tk

Peter Teuben teuben at astro.umd.edu
Wed Jul 4 20:44:06 UTC 2012


On 07/03/2012 08:27 AM, Jared Norris wrote:
> On 3 July 2012 07:15, Peter Teuben <teuben at astro.umd.edu> wrote:
>> 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.
> I'm not a developer myself but I'm led to believe the shortcut is
> installing the build-essential package [1]. I'm sure someone will
> correct me if I'm wrong.
>
>> 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
>>
> At the bottom of the USC you will see a little link with the comment
> "Show XX technical items" where XX respresents the number of packages
> that your search found but were hidden as most users would not
> normally need to use them. Simply clicking that link displays all the
> search results. Tkinter is the 5th result in the list after the items
> that were already displayed in my USC search.


heavens, today i was looking for libgtk2, and now I see that neat
link at the bottom showing more technical information, indeed,
so many useful things in there. Thanks much Jared, that's the tip
i needed. Yes, it's emberrassing now to just miss that link.


>
> I must admit at times I find this counter intuitive but then again for
> anyone that is simply an end user it is probably a much better
> experience than searching for an item with over 100 results when all
> you really need is a small handful of programs.
>
> [1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/build-essential

also very very useful! thanks again,

peter





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