Windows 7, 64-bit Python and easy_install
I recently downloaded and installed Windows 7 RTM on my laptop. I upgraded from 32-bit XP to a 64-bit flavor of Windows 7. I decided to install a 64-bit version of Python to take advantage of the 6GB of memory installed on my laptop. All well and good.
I proceeded to grab and set up easy_install which installed without any issues. Things started to go awry when I tried to actually install a package using easy_install. I started getting the following error:
Cannot find Python executable C:\Python25\python.exe
It turns out that this has been an issue with setuptools and 64-bit Python for a while:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/ActivePython/3343098
There is an active ticket for setuptools as well (with the last update dated August 11, 2009 at the time of writing):
http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue2
Hopefully, it will be resolved soon. My solution was to fall back to 32-bit Python in the interim.
Try to use PIP instead of easy_install:
http://pip.openplans.org/
I would love to use PIP however, it doesn’t work on Windows too well. From the PIP site:
There is a fork of PIP that is being worked on to support Windows:
http://bitbucket.org/carljm/pip-windows/
I haven’t tried it out yet.
Looks like this has been fixed.
http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue2