On a fresh Ubuntu 15.10 the following was required to get astroid going - but you should be able to get away with less.

The libsass-dev package is not available on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS due to dependency issues. When building astroid on this release use the --disable-sass build option.

Install these packages:

git \
scons \
g++ \
libboost1.58-all-dev \
libnotmuch-dev \
libglibmm-2.4-dev \
libwebkit-dev \
libwebkitgtk-3.0 \
libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev \
libgtkmm-3.0-dev \
libgmime-2.6-dev \
libsass-dev
libpeas-dev
libgirepository1.0-dev

To build:

$ git clone https://github.com/gauteh/astroid.git # clone repository
$ cd astroid
$ scons # build

To set up astroid and see what other requirements are needed, check out the tour.

To run astroid:

$ ./astroid

On xenial, some headers are either missing or different folders than expected (cf https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/211), hence you need to use this comand: $ CFLAGS="-I/usr/include/libpeas/ -I/usr/include/gobject-introspection-1.0" scons --disable-plugins