Problems installing the interpreter

[Theodor Rash]

Hi,

I am totally new to Python and ran into troubles already by trying to
install the interpreter. I unpacked the tarball (2.3a-2), configured and
then ran 'make'. Obviously the interpreter itself is build and started
automatically to execute setup.py and then stops with an error:
'Platform-independent libraries are not found'. In addition, traceback
shows that import of "os" failed 'cause it was not found.
It gives me the recommandation to set $PYTHONHOME to <prefix> but that
doesn't make no difference.
What am I doing wrong? (system is SuSE 7.3)
Theo