Reading a post on Planet Geospatial by Sean Gillies, I found out that there is a great python package that allows you to run python in an isolated environment. That is really useful to install and play with libraries without breaking your main installation!

The package is called virtualenv and is available for installation with the setuptools.

To install it, assuming you have a working python installation with setuptools, and run an isolated environment you just have to do:

$ sudo easy_install virtualenv
$ virtualenv –no-site-packages nameOfFolder
$ cd nameOfFolder
$ source bin/activate

All the options are described in the virtualenv page