How to activate virtualenv in Linux

Question

I have been searching and tried various alternatives without success and spent several days on it now - driving me mad.

Running on Red Hat Linux with Python 2.5.2 Began using most recent Virtualenv but could not activate it, I found somewhere suggesting needed earlier version so I have used Virtualenv 1.6.4 as that should work with Python 2.6.

It seems to install the virtual environment ok

[necrailk@server6 ~]$ python virtualenv-1.6.4/virtualenv.py virtual
New python executable in virtual/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
Installing pip...............done.

Environment looks ok

[necrailk@server6 ~]$ cd virtual
[necrailk@server6 ~/virtual]$ dir
bin  include  lib

Trying to activate

[necrailk@server6 ~/virtual]$ . bin/activate
/bin/.: Permission denied.

Checked chmod

[necrailk@server6 ~/virtual]$ cd bin
[necrailk@server6 bin]$ ls -l
total 3160
-rw-r--r--    1 necrailk biz12        2130 Jan 30 11:38 activate
-rw-r--r--    1 necrailk biz12        1050 Jan 30 11:38 activate.csh
-rw-r--r--    1 necrailk biz12        2869 Jan 30 11:38 activate.fish
-rw-r--r-

Problem, so I changed it

[necrailk@server6 bin]$ ls -l
total 3160
-rwxr--r--    1 necrailk biz12        2130 Jan 30 11:38 activate
-rw-r--r--    1 necrailk biz12        1050 Jan 30 11:38 activate.csh
-rw-r--r--    1 necrailk biz12        2869 Jan 30 11:38 activate.fish
-rw-r--r--    1 necrailk biz12        1005 Jan 30 11:38 activate_this.py
-rwxr-xr-x    1 necrailk biz

Try activate again

[necrailk@server6 ~/virtual]$ . bin/activate
/bin/.: Permission denied.

Still no joy...