Problem building Python 2.3.4 on RedHat Enterprise; tcl not found

[Russell E. Owen]

I'm trying to build Python 2.3.4 from source on a RedHat Enterprise 
machine for installation in a net-wide accessible directory /net/python. 
I tried all of the following variants of ./configure (the first was 
required for Python 2.3.3 on RedHat 9):
./configure --prefix=/net/python --enable-unicode=ucs4
./configure --prefix=/net/python
./configure --prefix=/net/python --enable-unicode=ucs2

All of these result in the ominous message (even the last form, which 
really surprised me):
checking for UCS-4 tcl... no

Having gone through the make in one case and gotten no _tkinter, I'm 
expecting the same results for the other two cases.

Any hints? At this point I'm spinning my wheels. I'm not even sure if 
tcl is built with UCS-4 or UCS-2 on RedHat Enterprise.

My fallback will be to build my own tcl/tk. Blasted RedHat. Python 2.3.3 
was working just fine under RedHat 9, and I'd have been happy to keep 
using it, but Tkinter is acting flaky after the OS upgrade -- 
tkColorChooser.askcolor is broken (returning strings that Python has no 
idea what to do with).

-- Russell