How do you assign bz2 to an altinstall of python?

Question

I\'m using redhat 5.8, which comes with python 2.4 installed automatically, but I\'m using a python package that requires python 2.6 or higher. SO, I installed python 2.7 a

Answer 1

The other answers provided are useful and helpful, but this is how I got this to work.

The problem wasn't that Python wasn't finding the files (as I thought), it just couldn't use them properly. So, I vi'ed into the Makefile for bzip2, found the line that looked like this:

CFLAGS= -Wall -Winline -O2 -g $(BIGFILES)

and added -fPIC to the line like so:

CFLAGS=-fPIC -Wall -Winline -O2 -g $(BIGFILES)

and WHALA! It compiled just fine.