Python – Fix ‘Could Not Find Platform Independent Libraries ‘ Error

In order to build python3.4.2 from source with the _tkinter module you need to install the following build dependency:

sudo apt-get install tk8.6-dev

Then all you have to do is running make again to add _tkinter support as the setup.py file will automatically detect the tk/tcl headers and create the module:

~/Downloads/Python-3.4.2$ make
running build
running build_ext
building '_tkinter' extension
gcc -pthread -fPIC -Wno-unused-result -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Werror=declaration-after-statement -DWITH_APPINIT=1 -I/usr/include/tcl8.6 -I/usr/X11/include -I./Include -I. -IInclude -I/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu -I/usr/local/include -I/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Include -I/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2 -c /home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Modules/_tkinter.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Modules/_tkinter.o
gcc -pthread -fPIC -Wno-unused-result -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Werror=declaration-after-statement -DWITH_APPINIT=1 -I/usr/include/tcl8.6 -I/usr/X11/include -I./Include -I. -IInclude -I/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu -I/usr/local/include -I/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Include -I/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2 -c /home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Modules/tkappinit.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Modules/tkappinit.o
gcc -pthread -shared build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Modules/_tkinter.o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.4/home/sylvain/Downloads/Python-3.4.2/Modules/tkappinit.o -L/usr/X11/lib -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -L/usr/local/lib -ltk8.6 -ltcl8.6 -lX11 -o build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.4/_tkinter.cpython-34m.so

Python build finished successfully!
The necessary bits to build these optional modules were not found:
_bz2                  _dbm                  _gdbm              
_lzma                 _sqlite3                                 
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.
[...]

Now you can import tkinter in python3.4.2:

~/Downloads/Python-3.4.2$ ./python 
Python 3.4.2 (default, Oct 30 2014, 11:34:17) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import tkinter
>>> 

Original answer:

Unless you really need python3.4.2, I would just use the default python3 version on 14.04 (3.4.0)

Then all you have to do is installaling the following packages:

sudo apt-get install python3-tk tk

And start the python interpreter this way:

/usr/bin/python3

Otherwise you'll always get the version that you installed in /usr/local (3.4.2).

Importing tk in python3 should work now:

$ python3
Python 3.4.0 (default, Apr 11 2014, 13:05:11) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import tkinter
>>> 

Pythons 2 and 3 live very happily next to each other on most Ubuntu installations. What you're describing (python3 mapping to a Python 2 binary) is not normal at all.

python needs to be mapped through to Python 2 by default. There are various scripts that aren't Python 3 compliant (it's not backwards compatible) so if you break the mapping from python, you break the system.

You're already seeing that from packages' postinst scripts that expect Python 2.

Here's how my python is mapped (a 14.04 install):

$ readlink -f $(which python)
/usr/bin/python2.7

So let's just remap /usr/bin/python back there:

sudo rm /usr/bin/python
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python{2.7,}

Then run your sudo apt-get -f install which should now be able to run without error.

If you've knackered things so badly, you might find yourself in the position where you need to manually unpack the Python packages into your system (they're just zips with header data).

If you've just munched /usr/bin/python2.7 (which should be the Python 2 binary) you can replace this by downloading the python2.7-minimal package and extracting the binary to the right place:

apt-get download python2.7-minimal
ar x python2.7-minimal_*.deb data.tar.xz
sudo tar xJf data.tar.xz -C / './usr/bin/python2.7'
rm data.tar.xz

That's based on the current 14.04 package. If you're on another release you might have to tweak paths. Or copy from a live system running the same version of Ubuntu.

More broadly speaking, if you want a Python development environment, I seriously suggest you look at the venv module. This is as with Py2's VirtualEnv except that it's built-in. You can install whatever you like in a non-root, non-system way and that includes mapping python to the Python binary you pick (including Pypy).

On 14.04 there's a bug in Python 3 that needs fixing before you can create a venv, but it that can be worked-around quite easily at the moment. We just need to install ensurepip:

wget -qO- http://d.pr/f/YqS5+ \
| sudo tar xzf - -C $(python3 -c "import sys; print(sys.path[1])") --no-same-owner

Then create and activate the venv:

python3 -m venv myvenv
source ./myvenv/bin/activate

Now you're in your own playground. You'll need to call the activate in the future (or call the myvenv/bin/python binary explicitly) to load the right Python path.