problems while installing python-mysql package

Question

I've got an Ubuntu 12.04 x64 Server edition VM that I'm running python2.7 on and trying to install the MySQLdb package via the command (I've already got easy_install installed and working):

$ sudo easy_install MySQL-python

but I get the following traceback error when easy_install tries to compile:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/usr/local/bin/easy_install", line 9, in <module>
 load_entry_point('distribute', 'console_scripts', 'easy_install')()
 File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/setuptools-1.1-py2.7.egg/pkg_resources.py", line 357, in load_entry_point
 return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name)
 File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/setuptools-1.1-py2.7.egg/pkg_resources.py", line 2393, in load_entry_point
 raise ImportError("Entry point %r not found" % ((group,name),))
ImportError: Entry point ('console_scripts', 'easy_install') not found

My /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages shows the following packages installed:

• distribute-0.7.3-py2.7.egg
• easy-install.pth
• pyinotify-0.9.4-py2.7.egg
• setuptools-1.1-py2.7.egg
• setuptools.pth

I'm not really sure where to go from here, or why I'm even getting this error. I also wasn't sure if this question would be better suited for ServerFault; but, since I ran into this issue while working on some code, I thought maybe some other coders had ran into it before too...(seemed logical at the time)

Answer 1

You seem to have installed distribute and setuptools, your easy_install script tries to load the entry point from distribute, but setuptools is found first.

You should remove distribute, as it has been merged back into setuptools and is now obsolete. Probably you'll need to reinstall setuptools after that to get everyting working again.

Answer 2

try the following:

curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
sudo python distribute_setup.py

then run sudo easy_install MySQL-python again.