GaussSum 3.0 apt-get Install simpledialog Fix In Ubuntu 24.04 (Others)

Above: Just needed an output from GaussSum for show-and-tell. This image from the article "Computational Study of Benzothiazole Derivatives for Conformational, Thermodynamic and Spectroscopic Features and Their Potential to Act as Antibacterials," available at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4352/12/7/912.

Continuing on the Ubuntu 24.04(.1) migration theme and in the thick of needing a program to simply prepare partial Density-of-States (that link, but in this case for molecular systems) analyses, users might find themselves working through the python3, numpy, gnuplot, cclib, python3-tk installation process on the old GaussSum Installing on Linux page without knowing that gausssum 3.0 has been available as a stand-alone apt-get for several recent Ubuntu versions.

That, minus the amount of dependencies that get installed to make the program happen, is the good news.

First attempting to run gausssum from a terminal after this apt-get install produces the following:

user@machine:~$ gausssum 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gausssum", line 23, in <module>
    import gausssum.gausssumgui
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/gausssumgui.py", line 27, in <module>
    from gausssum.preferencesbox import PreferencesPopupBox
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/preferencesbox.py", line 21, in <module>
    class PreferencesPopupBox(simpledialog.Dialog):
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^
NameError: name 'simpledialog' is not defined

As much as https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25905540/importerror-no-module-named-tkinter looks like an answer to the problem, the solution is a simple change at the very top of preferencesbox.py that can be found in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9570550/pythons-tkinter-simpledialog-askstring-not-working-from-command-prompt (I didn't bother to ask ChatGPT just to help keep the SO traffic up). Use your editor of choice:

sudo nano /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/preferencesbox.py

and make the following change to line 17:

import tkinter.simpledialog as simpledialog

After that, type gausssum, click on Help > About, and you should see the above, minus the previous NE-1 install in the background from the last post.