[COLUG] Mulitple Pythons in Ubuntu

[Josh]

Mark,

In CentOS, in the pre-5.0 days, I had some uses for Python 2.4, even 
though the Python that shipped with CentOS was 2.3.  To remedy this 
situation, I compiled Python from scratch and set the prefix to:

/opt/python-2.4.3

Install this, update ldconfig, and go.  To install apps using Python's 
buildutils, I just had to add an option like:

--with-python=/opt/python-2.4.3/bin/python

...or configure scripts using that specific interpreter.

This worked until I tried to implement these apps on CentOS 5, which 
already has 2.4.3.  It seems that similar major/minor combinations don't 
work with this trick (i.e. if you have 2.4.1 under /opt and the OS 
provides 2.4.3) due to library conflicts, but dissimilar combos (2.4.X vs. 
2.5.X) should work.

Hope this helps!  I had Zope running this way - just make sure that all of 
the Python scripts have the explicit interpreter you want as the first 
comment line...

Cheers,
-J