Prerequisites

You'll need a few packages (and whatever dependencies they require) installed first. Below is an accurate list as of 7/29/2010 for Ubuntu 10.04:

• gcc
• g++
• libsdl-dev
• automake
• autoconf
• libsdl-image1.2-dev
• libsdl-mixer1.2-dev
• libxml2-dev
• ftgl-dev

You can install these using the package manager. If you're on the terminal, one way to do this is: sudo apt-get install <package_name>

Checking out the Source

If you don't already have the source code, you can check out the latest development code (which should compile but doesn't always depending on development) by using git (note that git requires the git-core package installed on Ubuntu).