Welcome to IPython. Our full documentation can be found in the docs/dist subdirectory in .html and .pdf formats, also available online at our docs repo. The docs/source directory contains the plaintext version of these manuals.
For full details, see the installation section of the manual. The basic parts of IPython only need the Python standard library, but much of its more advanced functionality requires extra packages.
Officially, IPython requires Python version 2.6 or 2.7. An experimental port of IPython to Python 3.x is being developed at http://github.com/ipython/ipython-py3k.
You can run IPython from this directory without even installing it system-wide by typing at the terminal:
$ python ipython.py