linux-python arrow-key problem when in interactive interpreter

[Gabriel Cooper]

I'm running redhat 9 with python 2.3.3 and when I'm in gnome-terminal 
and inside the python interpreter I can't use the arrow keys anymore. 
They simply show ^[[A, ^[[B, etc.

It doesn't appear to be gnome-terminal's settings as XTerm has the same 
problem. If just at the command prompt they work fine, I'm able to hit 
up/down/left/right and see previous/next shell commands or move around 
to fix typos on the current line... however once I enter the python 
interpreter it stops working.

I have found no options in gnome-terminal for switching anything I would 
recognize as useful, such as to "VT100" or anything like that. The only 
remotely similar setting was a character encoding of UTF-8 (unicode) and 
that didn't seem applicable so I left it alone.

Technically this is probably a linux question not a python question but 
since it only (to my knowledge) happens in the python interpreter I 
thought you guys might know what I've done wrong.

Gabriel.