I finally got Google appengine running on my Dell mini9 and heres how ...

Download and upzip the appengine stk

unzip google_appengine_1.2.2.zip

appengine does not run on python 2.6 (the kubuntu default version) so install 2.5 from the commandline

sudo apt-get install python2.5

edit the first line of the dev_appserver.py file in the google_appengine sdk folder

#!/usr/bin/env python

to read

#!/usr/bin/env python2.5

Now that's out of the way we have to fix the permissions on the files in the SDK:

cd google_appengine
sudo chmod -R o+rx ./*

All done, enjoy