Mark,
That error comes from using the new version of rosinstall which requires
it's libraries to be in your package path, it can't be just copied in as a
script.  The old version was just a script, you can find it here
https://code.ros.org/svn/ros/installers/trunk/rosinstall/rosinstall

The other suggestion I have is that you download the tar.gz of rosinstall
and manually install it from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/rosinstall if
easy_install is still not working.

If you have python-defaults/2.6.5-11 or newer easy_install should be working
now according to the ticket
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=591606

Tully

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Mark Worsdall
<code.ros.org@wizdom.org.uk>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I know debian is not supported but with this lists help I got it running
> on my p4 3GHz, 32bit debian box.
>
> Unfortuntely it was not beefy enough to run the Shadow Robot Arm gazebo
> simulation. This has forced me to move up my migration to my other box,
> a Debian AMD64 job. Again testing
>
>
> So using my previous knowledge and knowing easy_install wont work I did
> the following, but get the error when running rosinstall:
>
>
> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get install bzr build-essential python-yaml cmake \
>                      subversion wget python-setuptools
> ~/rosinstall ~/ros http://ros.org/rosinstalls/cturtle_pr2all.rosinstall
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/home/mark/rosinstall", line 27, in <module>
>     import rosinstall.helpers
> ImportError: No module named rosinstall.helpers
>
>
> Any ideas?
>
> --
> Mark Worsdall
> http://www.shadowrobot.com/  need a hand??
> _______________________________________________
> ros-users mailing list
> ros-users@code.ros.org
> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>



-- 
Tully Foote
Systems Engineer
Willow Garage, Inc.
tfoote@willowgarage.com
(650) 475-2827