[python] Tkinter: "Python may not be configured for Tk"

Today I wanted to start working with Tkinter, but I have some problems.

Python 3.2 (r32:88445, Mar 28 2011, 04:14:07) 
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from tkinter import *
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.2/tkinter/__init__.py", line 39, in <module>
import _tkinter # If this fails your Python may not be configured for Tk
ImportError: No module named _tkinter

So how can I configure my Python 3.2 to work with Tkinter?

This symptom can also occur when a later version of python (2.7.13, for example) has been installed in /usr/local/bin "alongside of" the release python version, and then a subsequent operating system upgrade (say, Ubuntu 12.04 --> Ubuntu 14.04) fails to remove the updated python there.

To fix that imcompatibility, one must

a) remove the updated version of python in /usr/local/bin;

b) uninstall python-idle2.7; and

c) reinstall python-idle2.7.

So appearantly many seems to have had this issue (me including) and I found the fault to be that Tkinter wasn't installed on my system when python was compiled.

This post describes how to solve the problem by:

1. Removing the virtual environment/python distribution
2. install Tkinter with sudo apt-get install tk-dev (for deb) or sudo pacman -S tk (for arch/manjaro)
3. Then proceed to compile python again.

This worked wonders for me.

If you're running on an AWS instance that is running Amazon Linux OS, the magic command to fix this for me was

sudo yum install tkinter

If you want to determine your Linux build, try cat /etc/*release

Even after installing python-tk, python3-tk I was getting error your python is not configured for Tk.

So I additionally installed tk8.6-dev Then I build my Python again, run following again: make, make install.

When I did this I saw messages on screen that it is building _tkinter and related modules. Once that is done, I tried 'import tkinter" and it worked.

sudo apt-get install python3-tk

Oh I just have followed the solution Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams has suggest which is install tk-dev before building the python. (Building the Python-3.6.1 from source on Ubuntu 16.04.)

There was pre-compiled objects and binaries I have had build yesterday though, I didn't clean up the objects and just build again on the same build path. And it works beautifully.

sudo apt install tk-dev
(On the python build path)
(No need to conduct 'make clean')
./configure
make
sudo make install

That's it!

Install tk-devel (or a similarly-named package) before building Python.

Had the same issue on Fedora with Python 2.7. Turns out some extra packages are required:

sudo dnf install tk-devel tkinter

After installing the packages, this hello-world example seems to be working fine on Python 2.7:

$ cat hello.py
from Tkinter import *
root = Tk()
w = Label(root, text="Hello, world!")
w.pack()
root.mainloop()
$ python --version
Python 2.7.8
$ python hello.py

And through X11 forwarding, it looks like this:

Note that in Python 3, the module name is lowercase, and other packages are probably required...

from tkinter import *

I encountered this issue on python 2.7.9.
To fix it, I installed tk and tcl, and then rebuild python code and reinstall, and during configure, I set the path for tk and tcl explicitly, by:

./configure --with-tcltk-includes="-I/usr/include" --with-tcltk-libs="-L/usr/lib64 -ltcl8.5 -L/usr/lib64 -ltk8.5"

Also, a whole article for python install process: Building Python from Source

To get this to work with pyenv on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, I had to:

$ sudo apt-get install python-tk python3-tk tk-dev

Then install the version of Python I wanted:

$ pyenv install 3.6.2

Then I could import tkinter just fine:

import tkinter

To anyone using Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux, make sure that when you run the python command from the command line, it's not accidentally running the python installation from WSL! This gave me quite a headache just now. A quick check you can do for this is just
which <python command you're using>
If that prints something like /usr/bin/python2 even though you're in powershell, that's probably what's going on.

I think the most complete answer to this is the accepted answer found here:

How to get tkinter working with Ubuntu's default Python 2.7 install?

I figured it out after way too much time spent on this problem, so hopefully I can save someone else the hassle.

I found this old bug report deemed invalid that mentioned the exact problem I was having, I had Tkinter.py, but it couldn't find the module _tkinter: http://bugs.python.org/issue8555

I installed the tk-dev package with apt-get, and rebuilt Python using ./configure, make, and make install in the Python2.7.3 directory. And now my Python2.7 can import Tkinter, yay!

I'm a little miffed that the tk-dev package isn't mentioned at all in the Python installation documentation.... below is another helpful resource on missing modules in Python if, like me, someone should discover they are missing more than _tkinter.

Under Arch/Manjaro just install the package tk:

sudo pacman -S tk

You need to install tkinter for python3.

On Fedora pip3 install tkinter --user returns Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement... so I have to command: dnf install python3-tkinter. This have solved my problem