Trying to compile 0.77, 0.78 and 0.79 under Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

[Bruce H McIntosh]

When I attempt to build nonpareil via "scons-local/scons.py", I get the
following:

root at highlands:/usr/local/src/nonpareil-0.78#
scons-local/scons.py /usr/local/src/nonpareil-0.78/scons-local/scons-local-0.96.90/SCons/Sig/MD5.py:41: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
  md5 = imp.load_module('md5', file, name, desc)
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
/usr/local/src/nonpareil-0.78/scons-local/scons-local-0.96.90/SCons/Platform/posix.py:37: DeprecationWarning: The popen2 module is deprecated.  Use the subprocess module.
  import popen2
  File
"/usr/local/src/nonpareil-0.78/scons-local/scons-local-0.96.90/SCons/Tool/gas.py", line 36

    import as

            ^

SyntaxError: invalid syntax


Any notions of what occurs here?  Python version incompatibility maybe?
Python is at version 2.6.4 here; on my older machines where nonpareil
builds successfully, it's at 2.5.2.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Bruce H. McIntosh  scotsman at afn.org  www.afn.org/~scotsman  WA4UF
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         Network geek with a strong affinity for Telecasters