can't decompress data; zlib not available

[Tim Wintle]

On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 12:30 -0700, Steve Edlefsen wrote:
> I did a search on files named "python" on my machine.
> There are 23 not including the ones in the Plone
> buildout-cache in my account.  Seems like a lot of
> applications install their own copy of python.
> 
> There are also
> 
> ./usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so
> ./usr/lib/libz.so
> 
> which, I believe, are the zlib libraries.

but do you have the headers?

On my ubuntu it's

/usr/include/zlib.h

As Christian pointed out, Ubuntu 11.04 introduced some changes which may
have broken the installation - there is a patch on the python bug
tracker which will provide a work-around, but it is not going to be
applied to 2.6 or lower as they are not actively maintained branches any
more.

You'll need to run through the steps that the plone installer makes and
patch the extracted python directory before it makes it's local python.

> I've read that you can reinstall python with configure
> using the "--with-zlib" option, but configure isn't in
> 
> /usr/local/Plone/Python-2.6/lib/python2.6/config
> 
> I think the python interpreter for the command line is
> the one in /usr/bin/python.  Would this be the one I
> reconfigure for zlib?  Should I simply install python from
> 
> Python-3.2.2.tgz?

no - you need to use python2.6 - python3 is effectively a different
language.

python is a core part of *nix these days, so playing around recompiling
the system python can cause a lot of pain.


Tim