wow, ok, I got something new this time trying to generate the installer:
$ makepanda/makepanda.py --installer
Storing dependency cache.
Elapsed Time: 0 sec
Cannot build installer without python
but python is there
$ python
Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Jun 8 2009, 16:07:29)
[GCC 4.4.0 20090506 (Red Hat 4.4.0-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>