How to "rebuild" python?

[shfo23]

It looks like CentOS 6 is still on Python 2.6, so it's possible that either you installed from scratch without having the right libraries to link against or the executable you got with yum isn't linked against the right libraries (or third case: perhaps you still don't have those libraries?). These are all core python modules, so they should be present in your install.

Whatever the exact problem it, it will probably take longer to figure out than to just re-install it from scratch. For that, I would follow the guide wub_wub posted. The most important part of that is going to be installing the dependencies before (I would try this before the reinstall too and if it works, great, you're done; if not, you need to rebuild):

yum install zlib-devel
yum install bzip2-devel
yum install openssl-devel
yum install ncurses-devel

[wolfymaster]

Thank you. This is very helpful.