thread problem on Linux

[vaclav.dvorak.]

Hello!

I have an account on some Linux machine in school, so I thought I
 would test Python's portability, one of the reasons why I love it. I
 use OS/2, so I only had experience with Python on OS/2, but I
 assumed everything should work the same on Linux.

There was Python 1.5.1 on the Linux machine. My first problem was
 that it didn't have the thread module. So I downloaded the most
 recent RPM of Oliver Andrich with Python 1.5.2 for Linux, but
 because I don't have sufficient rights on the machine to install the
 whole RPM, I only extracted the one executable file to my home
 directory and tried again. The thread module is there, but doesn't
 work! thread.start_new_thread doesn't throw an exception, but the
 new thread simply doesn't run. When I accidentally pressed Ctrl+D,
 it seemed to run for a while, but then the whole script froze.

Would somebody please have an idea of what could be wrong? I admit
 that my knowledge of Unix is very limited, so perhaps this is an
 issue with Linux????

Bye, Vaclav/2.  (vdhome at idas.cz)