I was trying to install nltk on my Archlinux server but it repeatedly fails with the following error output /usr/lib/python3.3/distutils/dist.py:257: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'entry_points' warnings.warn(msg) /usr/lib/python3.3/distutils/dist.py:257: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'zip_safe' warnings.warn(msg) /usr/lib/python3.3/distutils/dist.py:257: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'test_suite' warnings.warn(msg) usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...] or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...] or: setup.py --help-commands or: setup.py cmd --help error: invalid command 'bdist_egg' /tmp/pip_build_root/nltk/distribute-0.6.21-py3.3.egg Traceback (most recent call last): File "./distribute_setup.py", line 143, in use_setuptools raise ImportError ImportError During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 16, in File "/tmp/pip_build_root/nltk/setup.py", line 23, in distribute_setup.use_setuptools() File "./distribute_setup.py", line 145, in use_setuptools return _do_download(version, download_base, to_dir, download_delay) File "./distribute_setup.py", line 125, in _do_download _build_egg(egg, tarball, to_dir) File "./distribute_setup.py", line 116, in _build_egg raise IOError('Could not build the egg.') OSError: Could not build the egg. ---------------------------------------- Cleaning up... Command python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip_build_root/nltk Storing complete log in /root/.pip/pip.log This error is also occurring for matplotlib buts thats the only other library I found it to fail on so far. pyyaml installs fine. The install works perfectly under virtualenv on my mac which is using python 2.7 but the server is using python 3.3. Any help is appreciated.