Getting pygame 1.5.5 to build on redhat 9 hinges on a few things:

• Knowing that ft_open_stream has been deprecated in the version of freetype2 that's been shipped with redhat 9 in favor of FT_OPEN_STREAM
• Patching SDL_ttf to not gack when it looks for ft_open_stream
• Using the smpeg and smpeg-devel rpms from redhat 7.3 and not from the loki site.

Phew. It would have really helped me out if somebody else had written the above on their own blog and that had been in google.