Sunday, September 27, 2015

Problem with ns2 and nam in Debian Jessie

I recently tried to install ns2 and nam, the network simulator and network animator in Debian jessie. They worked fine in the previous version of Debian wheezy but in jessie I got:


nam: 
[code omitted because of length]
: version conflict for package "Tcl": have 8.5.17, need 8.6
    while executing
"package require Tcl 8.6"
There seems to be a mix up with tcl/tk version 8.5 and 8.6 in the packages. I tracked down a solution that can be helpful to others:
  1. Add the packages from wheezy to your sources.list
  2. Downgrade the package libtclcl1. Maybe like this:
    
    aptitude install libtclcl1/wheezy
    aptitude hold libtclcl1
    
It seems that libtclcl1 is the package that breaks the whole thing. The jessie versions of ns2 and nam seems to work alright (but ns2 complains if it cannot find tcl8.6 so I keep tcl8.6 installed as well).