Installing Python 2.4 on Linux

[Edward Diener]

I can install Python 2.4 on the Fedora 3 Linux system, but after I do a 
number of Linux utilities and commands, like yum, stop working because 
they were dependent on the Python 2.3 installation. What happens is that 
Python 2.4 replaces the /usr/bin/python module with the Python 2.4 
version. If I replace /usr/bin/python with the Python 2.3 version 
executable, which is still on my system, that all the aforesaid modules 
depend on, they start working again, but I can no longer execute 
modules, like IDLE, which was part of my Python 2.4 distribution.

What is the solution to this ? The operating system was installed with 
Python 2.3 and the development libraries but no tools, doc, or 
otherwise. I have installed Python 2.4 with all the RPMs and copied down 
the Python 2.4 documentation to my machine ( since python24-docs.rpm 
gives one very little ). I would naturally like to use Python 2.4 
without killing all the commands that depend on Python 2.3. No doubt 
these commands have their modules in the site libraries for Python 2.3. 
Of course I would love to update these dependencies to use Python 2.4 
but newer RPMs for these commands do not exist.

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.