Installing Python (2.7) 'by hand' on Ubuntu - possible?

[Chris Green]

I have (as discussed here) a printer utility that uses Python 2 and I
can't update it to Python 3 because it has a .so library file which is
compiled for Python 2.  I think I have exhausted all the possibilities
for converting it to Python 3 so now I'm looking at how to keep it
working on my [x]ubuntu Linux systems as Python 2.7 becomes unsupported.

How realistic/possible would it be to run the utility in a separate
environment with its own copies of Python2 and any modules and
libraries needed?  I would install these 'by hand', i.e. not using
'apt' so they would stay as installed even as my system gets upgraded. 

There would obviously be *some* dependencies on the system libraries
but I think they'd be pretty low level and thus their interfaces would
be very unlikely to change for a long time so I should be able to run
my old Python2.7 and the Python modules needed for the utility for
quite a few years anyway (the printer it supports will wear out
eventually!).

-- 
Chris Green
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