Recently I went back to my Ubuntu 10.04 machine, and realized the default Python version is 2.6.5. So I decided to upgrade it to 2.7. At first I thought it was just a few clicks in the Synaptic, but it turned out to be needing a little bit more effort.
STEP 1. Go to
http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.6/Python-2.7.6.tgz
to download the most recent gzipped source tar ball. Then extract the files, cd to the extracted Python-2.7.6 folder, and do
./configure
make
sudo make install
The 'make install' by default will install Python 2.7.6 to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib, while the Python 2.6.5, the one that is originally shipped with Ubuntu 10.04, is located in /usr/bin and /usr/lib. It appears that /usr/local/bin/python takes precedence over