Error 1 during install of python 2.5 on CentOS

[nat]

Hi guys,

I'm running CentOS 4.4 and the current version on my system is Python
2.3.4. Ideally I wanted to use an RPM to update the system python
but a lot of dependencies failed and since I need to run the latest
Python for a particular script, I read on this group somewhere a
suggestion to run both on the same server and use:

"make altinstall"
So I downloaded the 2.5 tarball and ran ./configure and then 'make
altinstall'

Somewhere during the make it gave these errors. It continued after the
first error below but then that "Error 1" error is the last line and
it stopped there.
These are the errors:
Sorry: UnicodeError: ("\\N escapes not supported (can't load
unicodedata module)",)

make: *** [libinstall] Error 1

I can't find any information about this error. I'm kind of new to
compiling from sources so I don't what to do from here.

/usr/bin has no phython2.5 in it, so I take it the install didn't
complete.
Any ideas what to do from here?
Thanks
Nat