See installation for the installation instructions. Since NiPy is provided within stock distribution (main component of Debian, and universe of Ubuntu), to install all necessary requirements it is enough to:
sudo apt-get build-dep python-nipy
Note
Above invocation assumes that you have references to Source repository listed with deb-src prefixes in your apt .list files.
Otherwise, you can revert to manual installation with:
sudo apt-get build-essential
sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-numpy-dev python-scipy
sudo apt-get install liblapack-dev
sudo apt-get install python-sympy
Some functionality in NiPy requires additional modules:
sudo apt-get install ipython
sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib
sudo apt-get install mayavi2
For getting the code via version control:
sudo apt-get install git-core
Then follow the instructions at Submitting a patch.
And for easier control of multiple Python modules installations (e.g. different versions of IPython):
sudo apt-get install virtualenvwrapper