Thanks for that tip Following a dialogue in that discussion group it is now working. The problem was that I didn't have the right jpeg library installed (although what I had was enough to show jpegs in gThumb, GIMP and the Gnome and KDE desktops so I don't understand why it wasn't). I had to also install a jpeg development library, which fortunately was available on my Fedora Core 3 installation disc.
A final glitch was that the previous broken build interfered with the linking of PIL to the libraries. I went for overkill, and deleted all the PIL installation and site-packages directories, then reinstalled from the original tarball. This gave a curious glitch, in that the first time I ran it it failed to load Tkinter with some obscure error message, but on a retry everything was fine. This worries me slightly, as I don't know what happened and there is always a chance it could happen again, but until it does I can't investigate it. Slightly off topic, but I think my experience here is typical of any installation on a Linux system, and illustrates why, despite huge improvements over the last few years, Linux is not yet really suitable for non expert use. Thanks to everyone who's helped me over the last few months. Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
