Q:

What should I install Distribute or Setuptools

I am following a python bbok which says to install Distribute. However I am confused should I install Distribute or Setuptools as both of them have merged now. Is there still a difference between the two? Since I have installed pip and that automaticallly installs setuptools I want to know how can I check if Distribute or Setuptools is installed or not?

A:

The situation is legitimately confusing as there are too many installers available for Python and the landscape has changed recently.
Distribute was a fork of setuptools which itself is an extension to distutils. They merged back with setuptools in 2013. Your book is most likely out of date. The documentation of setuptools and distribute has been a confusing mess since it assumes you already have intimate knowledge of distutils. Distutils2 was an abandoned effort to get a more capable distutils into the Py3.3 standard lib.
Since distutils still lacks key features like generating executable wrapper scripts you would be best off working with a recent version of setuptools. Read through the distutils documentation first as setuptools is a superset of its functionality.
You can't depend on your users having setuptools installed so it is helpful to include the ez_setup.py bootstrapping script with your code. This will let your setup.py install setuptools if needed.

