Some tools in Backtrack Linux version 5 R3 were written for older versions of Python so if you are interested in using some of these tools in can be beneficial to install older versions of Python such as Python 2.4. Below I describe how to easily install Python 2.4 without causing issues with the Python 2.6 that is installed by default on Backtrack Linux 5 R3 or Ubuntu 10.04.
On one of my servers I run a couple sites via Django and recently when I upgraded the server it broke the Django sites that were running via FastCGI. After some investigation I was able to find the issue which happened to be a basic conflict between python2.4 which is the default python version on CentOS Linux and python2.6 which I installed to run via python26 instead of python. This way I can change the environment of any site that needs it to Python version 2.6 without much hassle. Below I describe the error in detail as well as what resolved the issue.
Recently we installed a development server running 64-Bit (x86_64) CentOS Linux. One of the things we needed to install was Python version 2.6 without overwriting the default Python version 2.4 on the server. The reason for not wanting to overwrite the default Python version is because other packages such as the Yum Package Manager depend on Python version 2.4. Anyhow in the past I have used the CHL repository for the Python version 2.6 packages because they are compiled to run as python26 or python2.6 and using the python command still launches python 2.4. Anyhow after installing the CHL yum repository as noted here we had issues installing python version 2.6 which I describe below along with how to resolve the issue.