diff --git a/.travis.yml b/.travis.yml
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+# vim ft=yaml
+# travis-ci.org definition for skimage build
+#
+# We pretend to be erlang because we need can't use the python support in
+# travis-ci; it uses virtualenvs, they do not have numpy, scipy, matplotlib,
+# and it is impractical to build them
+language: erlang
+env:
+    - PYTHON=python PYSUF=''
+    # - PYTHON=python3 PYSUF=3 : python3-numpy not currently available
+install:
+    # - sudo apt-get build-dep $PYTHON-numpy
+    - sudo apt-get install $PYTHON-dev
+    - sudo apt-get install $PYTHON-numpy
+    - sudo apt-get install $PYTHON-scipy
+    - sudo apt-get install $PYTHON-setuptools
+    - sudo apt-get install $PYTHON-nose
+    - sudo apt-get install cython
+    - sudo apt-get install libfreeimage3
+    - $PYTHON setup.py build
+    - sudo $PYTHON setup.py install
+script:
+    # Change into an innocuous directory and find tests from installation
+    - mkdir for_test
+    - cd for_test
+    - nosetests `$PYTHON -c "import os; import skimage; print(os.path.dirname(skimage.__file__))"`