Installing Python 2.4 on Linux

[John Ridley]

--- Edward Diener <eldiener_no_spam_here at earthlink.net> wrote:
[snip]
> I do not know whether this is a Python problem or a Fedora 3 problem
> but 
> I thought I would ask here first and see if anybody else had the same
> 
> problem. I imagine the problem might exist on other Linux systems.

On my Mandrake 10.1 system I have the default python 2.3 installation
plus a separate python 2.4 installation which I compiled from source.
There are two executables (python2.3 and python2.4) in /usr/bin, plus a
hard-link (from python2.4) named python. If necessary, I could switch
back to the default setup by replacing the hard-link with one from
python2.3 - so the system would then have its preferred python version
and I could selectively run python2.4 whenever appropriate. So far,
Mandrake has not complained about using python 2.4 exclusively, so I
might try removing the old installation eventually. (Then again, it's
always handy to keep it for compatibility testing).

Note that if compiling and installing from source there is an option of
'make altinstall' which will leave the existing python executables (and
man pages) as they are and just create a new python2.4 executable - by
default the library is installed in '/usr/local/lib/python2.4'. See the
README for details.


John Ridley

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