Thanks. I'll look into that, even though "python-dev" is probably some Ubuntu or other distro related package. Hopefully it should be possible to install the individual packages locally rather than changing the global installation...
It just runs on python, but the setup script downloads a bunch of packages (eg twisted). There was a recent thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=194472.0;all where someone was having problems with the install due to not running apt-get update and apt-get install python-dev. This is just FYI as you're clearly pretty clued-up with linux stuff.