Re: [Distutils] Where is distribute at pypi?

There's your problem. https://code.google.com/p/pydicom/source/browse/source/setup.py . It's trying to install distribute as a side effect of running setup.py, so it can import setuptools. This is now discouraged. The best solution would be to remove the first 3 lines of that file. Setuptools is guaranteed to be available when installing with pip.