pje> 1. Change your .pth file to read: pje> import site; site.addsitedir('/usr/local/mojam/lib/python2.3/site-packages') Did that: $ cat /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/mojam.pth # This file should be the only intrusion on the system-installed version of # python... import site; site.addsitedir("/usr/local/mojam/lib/python2.3/site-packages") pje> 2. Create a distutils.cfg in /usr/lib/python2.3/distutils/ with the pje> contents I mentioned before. Again with my desire to minimize cruft in /usr/lib/python2.3, I saw that setuptools is supposed to honor ~/.pydistutils.cfg and created: $ cat ~/.pydistutils.cfg [install] prefix = /usr/local/mojam [easy_install] site_dirs = /usr/local/mojam/lib/python2.3/site-packages Then, after removing all the previously installed .egg directories and the build directory in my Myghty source tree, I tried python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local/mojam again. Same result. So I suffered with creating /usr/lib/python2.3/distutils/distutils.cfg. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Same result: $ python Python 2.3.4 (#1, Feb 22 2005, 04:09:37) [GCC 3.4.3 20041212 (Red Hat 3.4.3-9.EL4)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import pkg_resources Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? ImportError: No module named pkg_resources What to try next? Skip