Installing Python 2.4 on Linux

[Joseph Garvin]

Another solution is to just install 2.4 and then make an alias for
yum='/usr/bin/python2.3 yum' or whatever the path is :)

Edward Diener wrote:

> 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.