

The other day a coworker pointed out some cool new features that we didn’t have available to us with IPython 0.10 from the stable repository. The only problem was debian’s maintainer hasn’t updated the sources since 0.11 for us to backport some of those features very easily. Since we spend a good chunk of time using IPython at Orvant we decided to go ahead and update the sources ourselves. But we figured other python people using debian stable might be tempted by those features as well. So what better to do than pass it on? Anyways, here is what you’ll need.

IPython Website

Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)

Source Package

You will also need to configure backports since ipython-parallel and ipython-qtconsole depend on zeromq.

http://backports.debian.org/

After you have configured backports you’ll need to install python-zmq which isn’t available in that repository. I have backported that too after a little cython/pyrex fun:

Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) AMD64

Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) i386

http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-zmq

Note: I couldn’t get notebook working with the version of python-tornado available in squeeze. So I kind of just ignored it since I wouldn’t really use something like that anyways. It might work if you install a newer version (2.1.0) from unstable but I suspect in the end that the package will get split out as ipython-notebook whenever the normal maintainer updates it. (due to dependencies among other things)