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