Installing on RHEL5_i386 Python error

[frisket]

I am trying to install Calibre on a Red Hat 5 server, and I'm getting this error when I paste the supplied sudo python command:

  File "<string>", line 1
    import sys; py3 = sys.version_info[0] > 2; u = __import__('urllib.request' if py3 else 'urllib', fromlist=1); exec(u.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read()); main()
                                                                                ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

As it's not clear where it's pointing (the Python people need to clean up their error reporting), I chopped up and pasted the commands into a file and tried to execute it. That got me

$ sudo python /usr/local/src/calibre.installer.py 
  File "/usr/local/src/calibre.installer.py", line 3
    u = __import__('urllib.request' if py3 else 'urllib', fromlist=1);
                                     ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

If it's really the conditional import that it's complaining about (the "if"), is there a version of the command string that will work under python-2.4.3-46 (presumably the command fails because the test for py3 isn't backwards compatible with anything before py3 :-)

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by frisket

If it's really the conditional import that it's complaining about (the "if"), is there a version of the command string that will work under python-2.4.3-46 (presumably the command fails because the test for py3 isn't backwards compatible with anything before py3 :-)

I think Calibre requires Python 2.7 and is not compatible with Python 3.

[kovidgoyal]

The test for python 3 isn't backward compatible with anything before python 2.5, which is half a decade old. Simply download the calibre binary tarball and extract it manually, it will work, provided glibc on your system is >= 2.10

[frisket]

OK, thanks for the explanation. The installed Python is 2.4.3 so I'll do it on a more modern server and this one can wait until it gets replaced with something more usable.