Dealing with large memory under linux or How to Build 64bit Python

[proteusguy at gmail.com]

I've got an Ubuntu (2.6.27-9-server SMP  i686 GNU/Linux) setup with
6GB RAM running python 2.5. I'm running a simulation program that is
breaking as soon as it hits ~3GB RAM even though I have plenty of RAM
free. I'm guessing that it's because my python is only 32-bit?

Appreciate any pointers on how to get my app to be capable of using
the full amount of RAM. I'm anticipating this may require me to
rebuild python from scratch for 64bits but I can't find instructions
on how to do that. Appreciate any help in this matter.

  -- Ben Scherrey