newbie-ness upgrade woes

[nemir]

I hope you can forgive the newbie-ness of all this,  but I have decided to 
run with Python as my learn first programming language now that I have been 
told to run a redhat apache server.

Lemme give you the rundown:

Installed an out of the box RedHat 7.1 server (WITHOUT a GUI) which comes 
with Python 1.5.2.  A little outdated I thought, so I determined that now 
the rest of the box is stable I will upgrade.  I go get the Python-
2.1.1.tgz file,  run 

tar xfvz Python-2.1.1.tgz

And it all uncompressed great.

I CD to the new Python-2.1.1 directory.

I try to run

python setup.py install

as per the instructions on http://python.org/doc/2.1.1/inst/standard-
install.html and it spits back the following error:

  File "setup.py", line 57
    extlist = [ext for ext in extlist if ext.name == modname]
                     ^

Same if I try to run python setup.py build


And I can't find what to do next anywhere.

B-/

Any advice would be *greatly* appreciated.


Thanks in advance,


Nemir