Fix Python – how to install python distutils

Question 1

I just got some space on a VPS server(running on ubuntu 8.04), and I’m trying to install django on it. The server has python 2.5 installed, but I guess its non standard installation. When I run install script for django, I get

amitoj@ninja:~/Django-1.2.1$ python setup.py install
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 1, in <module>
    from distutils.core import setup
ImportError: No module named distutils.core

I’m stumped. All the articles on internet tell me how to install modules using distutils. But how do I get distutils itself? Can anyone point me to the archive for distutils? I looked in /usr/lib/local/python2.5, /usr/lib/python2.5 etc, and as expected there is no distutils to be found.

Question 2

The simplest way to install setuptools when it isn’t already there and you can’t use a package manager is to download ez_setup.py and run it with the appropriate Python interpreter. This works even if you have multiple versions of Python around: just run ez_setup.py once with each Python.

Edit: note that recent versions of Python 3 include setuptools in the distribution so you no longer need to install separately. The script mentioned here is only relevant for old versions of Python.

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