Building Emacs 24.4 on Ubuntu 14.04

Gordon Tillman

I recently signed up for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with vpsdime. The idea is to set-up a complete development environment for all of my work and personal projects that I can access from a low-end device like a Chromebook or an iPad (with a suitable SSH app installed).

I opted for the High RAM VPS, which has the following specifications:

  • 6 GB RAM
  • 4 CPUs
  • 30GB Storage
  • 2TB/month traffic
  • 10 Gb connection

It is very reasonably priced at only $7.00/month. I had it spun up with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

My first requirements were installing Emacs 24.4 24.3 is the only version available in the repositories and I found no Personal Package Archive (PPA) that already supplied it. The remainder of this post documents the steps required to do this.

Dependencies

There are a few things you need to have installed before you can build Emacs. You need to update your list of repository sources first.

Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list as root. On a new Ubuntu 14.04 instance it looks like this:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-updates main restricted universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu trusty partner

You need to enable the source code repositories. This is very simple to do. Just duplicate the first four lines in the file and change deb at the beginning of the line to deb-src. When you have done this the file will look like this:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-updates main restricted universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu trusty partner
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main restricted universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-updates main restricted universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu trusty partner

Save your changes and then run the following command:

sudo apt-get update

Now you can install the dependencies that you will need:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get build-dep emacs24

Building Emacs 24.4

I like to organize my projects in a directory hierarchy like this:

  • $HOME/Projects/
    • 0-9/
    • a/
    • b/
    • …
    • z/

So, my Emacs build would be located in the $HOME/Projects/e directory. Please feel free to ignore the above. It is just a personal preference. With that out of the way, here we go…

mkdir -p $HOME/Projects/e
cd $HOME/Projects/e
wget ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-24.4.tar.xz
tar -xf emacs-24.4.tar.xz
rm emacs-24.4.tar.xz
cd emacs-24.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

That’s all there is to it!