Error while Installing Wordnet-3.0 on ubuntu: Can't find Tcl configuration definitions

Question

I downloaded Wordnet-3.0 and as it says tcl and tk must already be installed. So I checked this using following:

vidyasagar@vidyasagar-ThinkPad-Edge-E431:~/Documents/NLP/WordNet-3.0$ dpkg -s tcl
Package: tcl
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Installed-Size: 51
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Architecture: amd64
Multi-Arch: foreign
Source: tcltk-defaults
Version: 8.6.0+6ubuntu3
Provides: tclsh
Depends: tcl8.6 (>= 8.6.0-2)
Breaks: tcl8.3 (<< 8.3.5-15), tcl8.4 (<< 8.4.20-2), tcl8.5 (<< 8.5.14-3), tcl8.6 8.6.0-2)
Conflicts: tcl-lib, tcl8.5-lib
Description: Tool Command Language (default version) - shell
 Tcl is a powerful, easy to use, embeddable, cross-platform interpreted
scripting language.
This package is a dependency package, which depends on Debian's default
 Tcl version (currently 8.6).
Original-Maintainer: Debian Tcl/Tk Packagers <[email protected]>
vidyasagar@vidyasagar-ThinkPad-Edge-E431:~/Documents/NLP/WordNet-3.0$ 

So it seems it is already installed. Now I checked for tk.

vidyasagar@vidyasagar-ThinkPad-Edge-E431:~/Documents/NLP/WordNet-3.0$ dpkg -s tk
Package: tk
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Installed-Size: 51
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Architecture: amd64
Multi-Arch: foreign
Source: tcltk-defaults
Version: 8.6.0+6ubuntu3
Provides: wish
Depends: tk8.6 (>= 8.6.0-2), tcl
Breaks: tk8.3 (<< 8.3.5-16), tk8.4 (<< 8.4.20-2), tk8.5 (<< 8.5.14-3), tk8.6 (<< 8.6.0-2)
Conflicts: tk-lib, tk8.5-lib
Description: Toolkit for Tcl and X11 (default version) - windowing shell
 Tk is a cross-platform graphical toolkit which provides the Motif
look-and-feel and is implemented using the Tcl scripting language.
This package is a dependency package, which depends on Debian's default
 Tk version (currently 8.6).
Original-Maintainer: Debian Tcl/Tk Packagers <[email protected]>
vidyasagar@vidyasagar-ThinkPad-Edge-E431:~/Documents/NLP/WordNet-3.0$ 

Now I am in the folder WordNet-3.0 and I run ./configure
I am getting error as following:

checking for Tcl configuration... configure: WARNING: Can't find Tcl configuration definitions

What is the problem...?

Answer 1

It can't find a file (called tclConfig.sh) that describes exactly how to set up the compiler so as to have access to the Tcl header files and library files in their installation location; the place to find it is given via the --with-tcl option to the WordNet configure script. There's an equivalent one for Tk (tkConfig.sh) too.

I guess that you need the tcl-dev and tk-dev packages, since you're not just wanting to use Tcl and Tk but write code against the library. (Because that's how Debian-derived distributions like to package things.)