us to enable unicode ucs4 instead of the default ucs2. cd Python-2.5.4 sudo ./configure --prefix=/opt/python2.5 --enable-thread --enable-shared --enable-unicode=ucs4 sudo make sudo make install Creating a symbolic link from /opt/python2.5/bin/ to /usr/bin will allow us to call python2.5 from anywhere in our system without typing in the full path everytime. sudo ln -s