title: how to enable & disable tabs in a Tkinter/Tix Python GUI
body: <p>I'm trying to make a tabbed GUI in Python and I want to be able to toggle the enabled/disabled state of the tabs (i.e. prevent the user from switching tabs, and ghost non-active tabs out to make this fact obvious).  So far I've been unable to figure out how to do this state toggling.</p>
  
  <p>I've decided to go with Tkinter and/or Tix because they come built into Python distros on Windows, (guiding my users through installing extra third-party dependencies will be more trouble than it's worth). I've worked with Tkinter a bit but never Tix until now-tabs seem to require it. So I've built a two-tabbed Tix.NoteBook based on the demo at <a href="http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Demo/tix/samples/NoteBook.py" rel="nofollow">http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Demo/tix/samples/NoteBook.py</a></p>
  
  <p>For disabling a tab, the only relevant attribute of the Tix tab instance (e.g. <code>nb.hard_disk</code> in the demo code) seems to be <code>configure()</code> but naively doing something Tkinter-like, i.e. <code>nb.hard_disk.configure(state=Tix.DISABLED)</code>, results in <code>TclError: unknown option "-state"</code></p>
  
  <p>Searches for "disable Tix notebook tab" yield nothing, and even the more general "disable Tix widget" yields nothing I can understand/use. Grateful for any pointers in the right direction.</p>