[wavetossed]

What I tell people is that Python (as installed by apt-get, yum) is not on your system for you to develop with. It is there because some of the system tools are written in Python, including at least part of the apt packaging system. It's also there for System admins to use for writing Python scripts instead of bash scripts.

But for app development, get your own Python, manage it yourself and install 'distribute' so that you have both easy_install and pip to work with. I've taken that to extreme by making a portable Python distro that comes in a tarball and runs on any Linux distro, but even if you only untar the source and run ./configure --prefix=/home/python;make

That will build a default Python with support for any shared libraries for which you have a development version installed ( -dev version on debian/ubuntu, -devel version on redhat/suse)

sudo make install will install it, assuming that you have write permissions on the target prefix that you specified. You can even hide it in your home directory with --prefix=~/tools/python272

[mardiros]

I don't anderstand why you want to use the --distribute to have pip and easy_install installed.

If you do not, you also have those tools.