what is missing that prevents my IDLE from working?

Installed Ubuntu 10.10 and Python 2.5.5. IDLE did not start from the terminal so I went into the Python interpreter and did "import _tkinter". The package was not found.开发者_Python百科 After searching a bit, I found that Ubuntu/debian might not include _tkinter so I proceeded to "sudo apt-get install python-tk" as per my searches.

Still the interpreter cannot find _tkinter. What next?

Use Synaptic Package Manager (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager). Search for "idle".

There's an IDLE package in the Ubuntu software center that you can install. Install that and IDLE will work.

UPDATE

It is indeed in the Ubuntu software center on Ubuntu 10.10. Evidence:

The problem has been solved in another thread. The solution is to install tk-dev before installing Python 2.5.5 (on Ubuntu 10.10 which came with Python 2.6).

TK_LIBRARY and TCL_LIBRARY environment variables on Ubuntu