I am posting this because it took me ages to figure out how to solve this one. I could not get PIL to compile with JPEG, Zlib or freetype support on my virtualenv. I am using Ubuntu Oneiric Beta1 on a Lenovo Thinkpad X220. That is a 64bit installation. As read in every blog post out there, you first need to install the system libraries so PIL can find them. $ sudo apt-get install libjpeg libjpeg-d