Ncurses not found - embedded linux

[blaine]

Hello Everyone!
  I am hoping that someone out there can help me out with this
problem.  We are using a gumstix platform to develop an embedded
system.  All that really matters is that it is an ARM processor
running an embedded linux, details to follow.  Gumstix has its own
kernel tree that we cross compile for the system.  We do have python,
and it has all of the modules that I need except for one.  I need
ncurses (module curses).  I can't seem to figure out how to get it to
work - and the only documentation I can find is for Windows (because
windows doesn't have ncurses).  We have enabled ncurses support in the
kernel menu, and that has not helped.  I can't seem to trace down
where we would 'enable' ncurses support?  All other modules seem to
work that I've tried (termios, sys, os, etc.)

Output from python:
[root at gumstix ~]# python
, Feb 20 2008, 11:07:36)
[GCC 4.1.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import curses
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/curses/__init__.py", line 15, in ?
    from _curses import *
ImportError: No module named _curses

[root at gumstix ~]# uname -a
Linux gumstix 2.6.21gum #1 Tue Mar 4 15:31:07 EST 2008 armv5tel
unknown

[root at gumstix lib]# ls /usr/lib/*curses*
/usr/lib/libcurses.a@   /usr/lib/libncurses.a   /usr/lib/
libncurses.so@

[root at gumstix lib-dynload]# ls _*
_bisect.so*         _codecs_tw.so*      _random.so*
_codecs_cn.so*      _csv.so*            _socket.so*
_codecs_hk.so*      _heapq.so*          _testcapi.so*
_codecs_iso2022.so* _hotshot.so*        _weakref.so*
_codecs_jp.so*      _locale.so*
_codecs_kr.so*      _multibytecodec.so*

I hope this is trivial, and I apologize ahead of time if so.  Would
this perhaps be a compilation issue? Something we have to turn on in
the python compile?

Thank you,
Blaine Booher
University of Cincinnati