If you have all the prerequisites installed, then ipython can simply be installed using easy_install
without needing a package. Details of how to do this are given in the ipython documentation - you should take note of both the general ipython requirements and the notebook specific ones.
The major thing which might cause a hassle is pyzmq. This will involve compiling and installing the zeromq C libraries, which obviously require C compilers etc. I think by default the pyzmq installer tries to do this for you, but if it fails then you may have to do this compilation manually.
If you don't have root access to your machine, or if you want to test things before mucking around with system libraries, then I suggest using virtualenv to create an isolated python package directory in your own home directory.