Most of these instructions come from http://www.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingUbuntu but I'm going to add a last step that I had to work out.

If you want the latest build of inkscape (as in literally from today) you need to compile it yourself. That's what we'll be doing here. PLEASE NOTE that although this 'bleeding edge' version will probably have some new features and may fix a bug you're having, it is also probably unstable and much more likely to crash. If you use this, save your work very often and be prepared for some buggy behaviour. It is possible to have both stable and unstable inskcape versions installed at the same time.

Firstly, you need to have each of these packages installed:

build-essential autoconf automake intltool libglib2.0-dev libpng12-dev libgc-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libxslt1-dev libboost-dev libpopt-dev libgsl0-dev libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-dev libssl-dev libmagick++9-dev libwpg-dev

On Ubuntu, just do "sudo apt-get install" followed by all of that.

Once that's done, you need to download the source code. This will take a while because you're downloading over 100mb. CD into a directory that you'd like inkscape to be downloaded to and type this in a terminal:



After that, go into the 'inkscape' directory that was just created and run the following commands:



That will take around an hour to complete. If you get no errors (and you shouldn't if you downloaded all of the packages I mentioned above) then there will be an executable file, 'inkscape' inside the 'src' directory. You can, if you like, you can just run it from inside that directory (type "./inkscape" inside the src directory") but you may like to make it possible to type 'inkscape-unstable' to run it, just like a normal installation. To do that, type this command:



Obviously, change PATH-THAT-YOU-DOWNLOADED-THE-SOURCECODE/inkscape/src/inkscape to wherever the executable is.

If you run it and you have no tool icons, type this in a terminal:



That'll fix it.

This was a rushed job so comment if anything can be made more clear.

oh god it's really a painful operation , i prefer waiting for a ready compiled stable version , but thanx alot on that really good work

If you think most people will want to know that last step you may like to add it to the Wiki.

Done