tipfy mentions to make sure you have 2.5 installed on your system to avoid strange errors down the road

download and install zlib from source before compiling python source: | http://www.zlib.net/

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

for ubuntu, this is a good reference for installing from source: | http://welcometoubuntu.blogspot.com/2010/05/howto-install-python-255-on-ubuntu-1004.html

which says:

sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc cd Downloads wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.5.5/Python-2.5.5.tgz tar -xvzf Python-2.5.5.tgz cd Python-2.5.5 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/python2.5 make make test sudo make install sudo ln -s /usr/local/python2.5/bin/python /usr/bin/python2.5

setuptools: sudo bash setuptools-0.6c11-py2.5.egg /usr/local/python2.5/bin/easy_install-2.5

sudo /usr/local/python2.5/bin/easy_install-2.5 pyopenssl

also [2010.07.11 21:29:47] sudo /usr/local/python2.5/bin/easy_install-2.5 ssl needed to download this manually | http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ssl

tar zxvf ssl-1.15.tar.gz sudo python2.5 setup.py install

Go to ${PYTHON_HOME}/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ssl and delete the __init__.pyc file. Now fire up a Python shell and try "import ssl" again.

still getting AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'HTTPSHandler'