Python 2.3/idle installation problems

[Dave In Redmond]

Hopefully this is a simple nooB issue. Python seems to work but idle works
only when I'm root. When I'm logged in as dave, I get the following error:

[dave at Pippin Python-2.3]$ idle
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/idle", line 4, in ?
    main()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/idlelib/PyShell.py", line 1264, in main
    root = Tk(className="Idle")
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 1564, in __init__
    self.tk = _tkinter.create(screenName, baseName, className)
_tkinter.TclError: couldn't connect to display ":0"
[d

Here are the steps I ran through:
- downloaded the tarball onto a RH9/KDE platform, 
- did a gunzip and tar, 
- ran the ./configure with --enable-unicode=ucs4
- did the make
- switched to root and did the make install
- after it failed I did a make clean and ran through the same steps with the
same results (d'oh!)

Any suggestions?