How I got ruby to work with Tk

[hasimir44]

It bugged me that the "Simple Tk Application" from the pickaxe book wasn't working:

http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_tk.html

Everytime I ran a ruby script with:

require 'tk'

I got the following error:

`require': no such file to load -- tk (LoadError)

So I..

1. Uninstalled ruby from apt-get
sudo apt-get remove ruby

2. Found out what version of tk I have installed:

ls -d /usr/lib/tk*
/usr/lib/tk8.4

3. Found out what version of tcl I have installed:

ls -d /usr/lib/tcl*
/usr/lib/tcl8.4

4. Found out where my tcl includes are:

ls -d /usr/include/tcl*
/usr/include/tcl8.4


5. Downloaded the source for ruby (link for 1.8.6):

ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz

6. Unpacked the tar and entered the source (sorry Bruce, no dragons :))

tar zxvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6

7. Configured (using steps 2, 3, and 4), built and installed:

./configure --with-tcl-include=/usr/include/tcl8.4/ --with-tcllib=tcl8.4 --with-tklib=tk8.4 --enable-pthread
make
make test
sudo make install


The above may not be the best way to accomplish this task, but hey.. it worked for me :)

[winch]

Or you could have installed libtcltk-ruby from universe ;)

[hasimir44]

now you tell me :)