I use Lubuntu 14.04 as a guest OS (using VMplayer). I wanted to install python3.4.3. I downloaded the .tar.xz file from here:
https://www.python.org/downloads/
I then extracted the file and followed the instructions in the README:
./configure
make
make test
When I ran
make test
it returned this:
359 tests OK.
3 tests failed:
test_urllib test_urllib2 test_urllib2net
3 tests altered the execution environment:
test___all__ test_site test_warnings
25 tests skipped:
test_bz2 test_curses test_dbm_gnu test_dbm_ndbm test_devpoll
test_gdb test_gzip test_idle test_kqueue test_lzma test_msilib
test_ossaudiodev test_readline test_smtpnet test_sqlite test_ssl
test_startfile test_tcl test_tk test_ttk_guionly test_ttk_textonly
test_winreg test_winsound