At school, I am forced to use some Redhat 9 machines. I prefer Debian, but it wasn't up to me. In order to make life bearable, I've backported some recent Python RPMs and I'm making them available as a convenience to others in the same situation. These RPMs install Python 2.3 and the excellent Python Imaging Library for Redhat 9 only. If you are using Fedora, get the RPMs from the Python website. They will not replace the existing version Python, so you will need to run python2.3 instead of python.