I've tried to compile Python 2.7 on Ubuntu 10.4, but got the following error message after running make:
Python build finished, but the necessary bits to build these modules were not found:
_bsddb bsddb185 sunaudiodev
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.
What packages do I need? (setup.py was not helpful)
sudo apt-get build-dep python2.6 python-gdbm python-bsddb3 (Use python2.7 on maverick).
For more information, see this answer. Also look at this page, which applies equally for building on Lucid.
Those are older, (mostly depreciated) modules that you probably won't use. You should be able to safely ignore the warnings.
The one that you may want to worry about trying to fix is _bsddb, which should go away once you install Berkeley DB 4.8... I'm not sure if it's in the Ubuntu repos or not. (edit: apparently it's the db package)
bsddb185 is an older version of the Oracle Berkley Database module. You can safely ignore it as far as I know.
sunaudiodev is depreciated, undocumented, I doubt you'd ever need to use it anyway. You should be able to safely ignore it.
Hope that helps a bit, anyway...