[Distutils] sh execution of setuptools egg not working

[Stephen Waterbury]

I'll probably realize what stupid thing I'm doing as soon
as I send this message, but oh well if that's what it takes ... ;)

I want to install setuptools on a centos 4.3 system, for which
the system python is 2.4 (ugh) so I've compiled and installed
python 2.6 into /usr/local.  When I try running the setuptools
egg as a shell script, the following happens:
---------------------------------------------------------------
$ type  python2.6
python2.6 is /usr/local/bin/python2.6
$ sudo sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg
[sudo] password for waterbug:
setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg: line 3: exec: python2.6: not found
---------------------------------------------------------------

... which seems odd.  Just as an experiment, I tried running
it without sudo -- it then finds python2.6 but conks out with
a different error:

---------------------------------------------------------------
$ sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg prefix=~
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named setuptools.command.easy_install
---------------------------------------------------------------

Any suggestions appreciated!  Hope this isn't a faq that I
missed ...

Thanks,
Steve