Freedom Environment
(F.E. = effie)

Tcl-Tk (8.5) Interpreter
Install Notes

FE Home page > This FE Tcl-Tk 'wish' Install Notes page

INTRODUCTION:

It was pointed out on the FE home page that one way to install the Tcl-Tk 'wish' interpreter environment, if it is not available already in your Linux distro, is to install a Tk application like 'TkDiff'.

Ubuntu 9.10 did not have the Tcl-Tk system in that distro, and with a few clicks in the Ubuntu Software Center, I installed 'TkDiff', which brought along the Tcl-Tk 'wish' interpreter system --- where 'wish' is a contraction of 'window shell'.

Unfortunately, it brought the Tcl-Tk 8.4 system in which fonts do not look the greatest because font anti-aliasing was not yet incorporated. It was in Tcl-Tk 8.5 that the font anti-aliasing system ( Xft = X freetype ) was incorporated.

So here is a quick outline of how I installed Tcl-Tk 8.5 on Ubuntu 9.10 --- so that nice anti-aliased fonts were displayed in FE Tcl-Tk applications like 'feAppMenus' and 'xpg'.

Tcl-Tk 8.5 install :
(in place of 8.4)

First of all, on checking the '/usr/bin/wish' interpreter, I found that it was a link to another file : 



  $ ls -l /usr/bin/wish
  
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-11-01 16:27 /usr/bin/wish -> /etc/alternatives/wish

On doing 'ls -l /etc/alternatives/wish', it was revealed that it too was a link, to /usr/bin/wish8.4.

So I installed Tcl 8.5 and Tk 8.5 with the command 



  sudo apt-get install tcl8.5 tk8.5

After doing that, the following 'ls' command revealed that the wish 8.5 interpreter was installed. 



  $ ls -l /usr/bin/wish*
  
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   22 2009-11-01 16:27 /usr/bin/wish -> /etc/alternatives/wish
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5496 2009-04-29 14:49 /usr/bin/wish8.4
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5496 2009-04-29 14:50 /usr/bin/wish8.5

I removed the 'soft link' /usr/bin/wish with the following command. 



  $ sudo rm /usr/bin/wish

I verified that the 'soft link' was removed with the following 'ls' command. 



  $ ls -l /usr/bin/wish*
  
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5496 2009-04-29 14:49 /usr/bin/wish8.4
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5496 2009-04-29 14:50 /usr/bin/wish8.5

I issued the following 'ln' command to re-establish the /usr/bin/wish link --- but to wish8.5 this time. 



  $ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/wish8.5 /usr/bin/wish

I verified that the 'soft link' was re-established with the following 'ls' command. 



  $ ls -l /usr/bin/wish*
  
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   16 2011-06-29 02:52 /usr/bin/wish -> /usr/bin/wish8.5
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5496 2009-04-29 14:49 /usr/bin/wish8.4
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5496 2009-04-29 14:50 /usr/bin/wish8.5

Now when I started up the 'feAppMenus' Tk GUI and the 'xpg' Tk GUI, the fonts were shown in a much nicer anti-aliased form.

Voila.

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Page history:

Page was created 2011 Jun 28.

Page was changed 2018 Aug 07.
(Added css and javascript to try to handle text-size for smartphones, esp. in portrait orientation.)

Page was changed 2019 Jun 13.
(Specified image widths in percents to size the images according to width of the browser window.)