I am doing a course with udacity which requires installation of google

google appengine requires python 2.5 specifically. 2.6 as supplied in the distro (10. 04) will not do.

So, having found 2.5 on www.python.org i uninstalled 2.6

this seems to have been a BAD IDEA

Ubuntu hung. Nothing would work. I had to do a hard reboot and when it came back up it was in low graphics mode. However i ran configure, make and make install.

I rebooted. Now it's just sitting with the dots going orange, white ad infinitum.

what do i do now?