This section assumes you are running linux. You may need administrator rights to complete this section. First try
sage: import Tkinter
If this works great if not it means your sage was not compiled with tcl/tk bindings. There are two possible reasons. If you used a binary then this will be the case. If you built from source but don’t have the tcl/tk libraries on your system you will have the same problem. To fix this install the tcl and tk libraries and development (source and headers) packages for your linux distribution. Now you need to rebuild Sage’s python
sage: install_package('python-2.5<version>.spkg')
where you should replace by the version of python. Type
sage: !ls spkg/standard | grep python-2.5
This will give you the name of the python package to use above. In the case that it gives multiple names, choose the one with the highest version number. Now again try
sage: import Tkinter
If this works we can install vtk, but first you need cmake. Test if your system has it by typing cmake at the shell, (or !cmake in sage). If cmake is on your system then you are ready. If not either install cmake on your system using your distributions tools or do
sage: install_package('cmake-2.4.7')
Now we want to compile VTK which does all the hard work. To do this make sure you have the opengl libraries for you system installed. This will be something like libgl1-mesa-glx, libgl1-mesa-dev.
sage: install_package('vtk-5.0.3.p1')
This will take quite a while to compile, probably 20 min to an hour or so. Once this is done we install the python wrappers, the next part takes about 10 seconds,
sage: install_package('MayaVi-1.5')
sage: install_package('scitools++')
sage: install_package('PyVTK-0.4.74')
Now you’re done.