I tried the tutorial on a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 LTS VM it worked with the following quirks
sudo apt-get python python-dev
sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libjpeg-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
edit buildout.cfg to replace http by https in extends and add an index stanza
index = https://pypi.python.org/simple/
I have no idea why you should get a too recent setuptools with this procedure.
You can check the version by launching the virt env
source buildoutvenv/bin/activate
python
>>> import setuptools
>>> setuptools.__version__
'24.3.0'
if you get that your should not get this message when running bin/buildout in the virtual env as said in the doc
Maybe you could try again with a less outdated OS version as Ubuntu 12 is long out of support.