I'm a big fan of using virtualenv to keep development environments separated and want to use IPython notebooks with those virtualenvs. One might think that you could just install ipython and go but it turns out that there are a couple other steps needed to make this work. Before working with the virtualenv, we need zeromq-devel before we can build and install pyzmq in the virtualenv
yum install zeromq-devel
To create a new virtualenv that's ready for IPython notebook:
virtualenv --distribute env
source env/bin/activate
pip install pyzmq tornado ipython
Now we can use IPython notebook inside the virtualenv!
ipython notebook