running Ubuntu 12.04, I had the usual python 2.7 in place .

I needed python 2.6 , so I downloaded the source and did 

```
./configure
make
sudo make install

```

A mistake, as I did not want to replace my system-wide python . 
Now some programs stopped working , e.g. update-manager with 

```
ImportError: No module named gi.repository

```

I used update-alternatives to make python 2.7 default again, but many python applications still won't start up because of some missing modules .

Can someone give a hint what happened and what the best way to fix it would be? 

Thanks in advance.

Edit : 

I could get some functionality of apt-get to work by setting my own hard link from /etc/python to /etc/python2.7 .
( So I guess using update-alternatives really did not do much good eithe. )
I did a dist-upgrade , which basically worked, but a lot of the package managing via apt-get is still broken.
In particular, a **problem with python-minimal** prevents many other installations of packages I wanted to do .

```
Setting up python-minimal (2.7.3-0ubuntu7) ...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 162, in _run_module_as_main
    "__main__", fname, loader, pkg_name)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 72, in _run_code
    exec code in run_globals
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/compileall.py", line 16, in <module>
    import struct
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/struct.py", line 1, in <module>
    from _struct import *
ImportError: No module named _struct
dpkg: error processing python-minimal (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 255

```

PS:
**Building 2.7 from source** always did exit (also before dist-ugprade or update-alternatives) with 

```
make: *** [libinstall] Error 1

```

Currently, on make , there are more issues (" Python build finished, but the necessary bits to build these modules were not found:
\_bsddb bsddb185 bz2  

dl imageop sunaudiodev  

To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect\_modules() for the module's name.
") 

As this is a little over my head , I guess I am just better off with a fresh install from scratch .