Installing Python 2.7 for all users on SLES 11

[Bo Stone]

I installed Python 2.7 on SLES 11 box that previously was running Python 2.6. To do so I used a script described in this post (http://stackoverflow.com/a/11371726/135946) and run it as a root user. Everything went well but when it was done I discovered few issues:

1. No symbolic links were created and no path updated so I had to manually update the path to link to the new installation bin directory /opt/python2.7/bin
2. Everything runs good until I switch from root to the normal user at which point Python shell runs but some modules I installed such as PyYAML are missing. Again, these are OK when I run Python as root
3. As a regular user I'm not able to run pip, easy_install and wheel. For pip I get "ImportError: No module named pkg_resources"

This question is also posted to Stackoverflow here: http://stackoverflow.com/q/38749809/135946