tkagg backend problems

I had this issue today.

By default, Tkagg was not available for me (Ubuntu 14.04), so I ran:

sudo apt-get install tk-dev libpng-dev libffi-dev dvipng texlive-latex-base

Then uninstalled and reinstalled matplotlib:

pip uninstall matplotlib
pip install matplotlib

I solved it by compiling matplotlib from source. It has Tkagg active by default. Only problem was it didn't compile Tkagg since I didn't have tk-devel installed... after installing it everything went ok.

So I still don't know if easy_install matplotlib doesn't use TkAgg by design, or if it too checked and noticed that I didn't have Tk.h installed, but anyway this is the way to go.