After some deliberation I have decided to teach myself common lisp. In order to get going with Lisp on ubuntu (and to do it in the traditional way) I had to install emacs along with some other tools like slime (the canonical lisp development environment). Using aptitude for this entire process is possible, but not optimal -- one will end up with an outdated version of slime and Debian will not be packaging lisp tools in the future. The best way to get started with a Lisp system on Ubuntu is to use cbuild. This blog entry is meant to be a quick howto for getting slime running on Ubuntu with cbuild.

(1) Install emacs using aptitude: $ sudo aptitude install emacs

(2) Download the binary tarball for sbcl for your platform: http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/platform-table.html
(a)$ tar -xvvf your-sbcl-tarball.tar.bz2
(b) $ cd your-sbcl-directory
(c) your-sbcl-directory$ sudo sh ./install.sh

(3) Get the revision control tools clbuild uses: $ sudo aptitude install -R git-core darcs cvs subversion mercurial curl

(4) Get clbuild (which is maintained in darcs): $ darcs get http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/clbuild

(5) Make the clbuild shell script executable.
(a) $ cd clbuild
(b) clbuild$ chmod +x clbuild

(6) clbuild uses helper applications. Check to make sure they are installed: clbuild$ ./clbuild check

(7) If you like you can see various clbuild commands: clbuild$ ./clbuild help

(8) Install slime with clbuild: clbuild$ ./clbuild install slime

(9) Start slime in emacs with clbuild: clbuild$ ./clbuild slime

Now you should have all the infrastructure needed to begin hacking in lisp! I plan on using this highly recommended book ---- http://gigamonkeys.com/book/