I am completely 100% new to redhat. I have a little bit of experience with debian but I'm still relatively new. I'm trying to install python purple with no luck. Can anyone help me with it?
I couldnt find libpurple-dev with yum... I did find libpurple-i386
Development files normally have the postfix -devel in Redhat/Fedora (but unfortunately sometimes without the lib prefix).
The package is called libpurple-devel in Fedora 11 and I think that might be true for Redhat too. Try yum search purple to search for packages.
Anyway, there seems to be no official python binding maintained by libpurple project yet, so you must probably download and compile the experimental binding on your own.
You can get the most recent version of the binding with the following command (the package subversion must be installed for that):
svn co https://garage.maemo.org/svn/carman/trunk/python-purple/
After that you can change into the newly created python-purple/ directory and read the REAME file. I hope that helps :)