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The title explains pretty much all I need to do. I need a downgrade from tk8.6 to tk8.5 on 14.04.

There is some niche scientific python based software that I need to use, however it is incompatible with tk8.6 and is compatible with tk8.5; download available here. Ideally I would like a method that poses minimal risk to my system.

Here are some details that might be useful.

me@James:~$ whereis tk
tk: /usr/lib/tk8.6 /usr/include/tk
Sylvain Pineau
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1 Answers1

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There's no easy way to downgrade tk to 8.5 on 14.04, even if you install tk8.5.

This method is not recommended as it's basically installing the 13.10 packages version on a 14.04 system.

First of all, to restore your system, the command to use will be:

sudo apt-get install blt python-tk

Now to downgrade to tk8.5:

  1. Install tk8.5:

    sudo apt-get install tk8.5

  2. Download the following debian packages from the 13.10 repo (amd64 in this example but you can choose the i386 for a 32bit system):

  3. Open a terminal where you downloaded the two .deb files and type:

    sudo dpkg -i blt_2.4z-7_amd64.deb python-tk_2.7.4-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

  4. Now to check if the right version is available to your python interpreter:

    $ python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import Tkinter
>>> Tkinter.TkVersion
8.5
>>> import platform
>>> platform.release()
'3.13.0-36-generic'
>>>
Sylvain Pineau
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  • Should I open a new question on how do I stop Tkinter updating once I have downgraded or shall we modify this question? – James Oct 06 '14 at 10:22
  • @GoodGravy: Check this [question](http://askubuntu.com/questions/18654/how-to-prevent-updating-of-a-specific-package). You'll need to lock versions for both `blt` and `python-tk`. – Sylvain Pineau Oct 06 '14 at 10:32