Red Hat Enterprise 5 ships with Python 2.4.  As it uses this for the majority if its inbuilt scripts, it’s probably not such a good idea to just change it.

With this in mind, I built the following Python 2.5 RPMs, which create the python executable as /usr/bin/python25.  This means that where necessary, you can use Python 2.5, but the system scripts will continue to use 2.4.  If you do want to use Python 2.5 by default, by all means make /usr/bin/python a symlink to this – but don’t complain to me if ‘bad things’ happen.

64-bit RPMs:

python25-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
python25-devel-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
python25-libs-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
python25-test-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
python25-tools-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm

Source RPM:

python25-2.5.1-bashton1.src.rpm