No module named MySQLdb even if MySQL-python installed?

Question

I have a CentOS box.

(venv)[root@localhost]# yum install MySQL-python
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit, security
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
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 * extras: mirror.us.leaseweb.net
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Setting up Install Process
Package MySQL-python-1.2.3-0.3.c1.1.el6.x86_64 already installed and latest version
Nothing to do

...

(venv)[root@localhost]# python
Python 2.7.6 (default, May 20 2014, 20:23:08)
[GCC 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import MySQLdb
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named MySQLdb
>>>

What do I do?

and when I try pip install mysql-python I get this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/user1/project/venv/bin/pip", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/home/user1/project/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 185, in main
    return command.main(cmd_args)
  File "/home/user1/project/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 161, in main
    text = '\n'.join(complete_log)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 65: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

You need to force pip to use the default localization settings. Instead of:

pip install mysql-python

do:

LC_ALL=C pip install mysql-python

If you run into an error: Python.h: No such file or directory, then you'll need to install an additional library:

yum install python-devel