I wanted to install easy_install on my Debian server so that I could use it to install web.py. I thought that easy_install would be the name of a .deb package, so I first tried running apt-get install easy_install but that didn't work.

What I learned is that easy_install is included in setuptools which is installed on Debian based systems by running:

    apt-get install python-setuptools

    
That's all you've got to do in order to install the python setup tools along with easyinstall on a Debian based system.

Now, to use easy_install?.

Here's what I did to use easy_install to install the web.py python framework:

    easy_install web.py

    
That was all I had to do. Now I've got web.py installed on my server and I can continue to do the web.py tutorials.