Trouble installing Python on RedHat 9

[Gabriel Cooper]

I have this old PC I'm using as a development box to emulate my work 
environment, only I don't know much about the admin side of linux, so 
I'm having very newbie-type problems getting started. I have red hat 9 
on an old PC and I'm trying to install an updated version of python. 
Currently I think it has python 2.2 but I wanted to update to 2.3 for 
the sake of knowing I could do it, so I downloaded the tarball, 
uncompressed it, then ran ``./configure --prefix=/usr`` to compile it 
such that it would overwrite the 2.2 install.

Everything went OK with configure so I ran make, which died giving parse 
errors in some tk file. After some reading some I came across this:

"If you're compiling from source on Red Hat 9, RH9 compiles Tcl/Tk as 
UCS-4, but Python still defaults to UCS-2. You can either use

              ./configure --enable-unicode=ucs4

with Python, or you can try Anthony Baxter's patched version of Tcl/Tk"

So I tried that, along with my prefix= parameter but I still get the 
same error. I grabbed my red hat 9 disks and found an RPM labelled 
"tk-something" so I installed that and tried again, but got the same 
errors (or what appear to be the same errors).

Anyway, here's a small snippet of what ``make`` throws at me:

[...]
gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC 
-fno-strict-aliasing -DWITH_APPINIT=1 -I/usr/X11R6/include -I. 
-I/root/packages/Python-2.3.3/./Include -I/usr/local/include 
-I/root/packages/Python-2.3.3/Include -I/root/packages/Python-2.3.3 -c 
/root/packages/Python-2.3.3/Modules/_tkinter.c -o 
build/temp.linux-i686-2.3/_tkinter.o
In file included from /root/packages/Python-2.3.3/Modules/_tkinter.c:71:
/usr/include/tk.h:83:29: X11/Xlib.h: No such file or directory
In file included from /root/packages/Python-2.3.3/Modules/_tkinter.c:71:
/usr/include/tk.h:581: parse error before "Bool"
/usr/include/tk.h:583: parse error before "event"
/usr/include/tk.h:584: parse error before "root"
/usr/include/tk.h:585: parse error before "subwindow"
/usr/include/tk.h:586: parse error before "time"
/usr/include/tk.h:586: `time' redeclared as different kind of symbol
/usr/include/time.h:184: previous declaration of `time'
/usr/include/tk.h:591: parse error before "same_screen"
/usr/include/tk.h:597: parse error before "Bool"
[...]

Any ideas? If I just need to RTFM, let me know which "M"! ;)

Thanks!