I ran into some problems installing numpy in a virtualenv on Ubuntu 10.10. I’m not sure what the root cause of the problem was, but my environment is a little weird in that I have a number of different python versions installed and virtualenvs using different versuons of python. The setup for numpy wasn’t finding global environment configuration variables from the call to sysconfig.get_config_vars. I ended up fixing my issues by copying the global Makefile and pyconfig.h into the virtualenv:
$ mkdir -p /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/lib/python2.7/config/ $ cp /usr/lib/python2.7/config/Makefile /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/lib/python2.7/config/ $ mkdir -p /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/include/python2.7/ $ cp /usr/include/python2.7/pyconfig.h /home/ghing/.virtualenvs/foodgenius-analytics/local/include/python2.7/