Updated 2011-04-19, see this post.

I enjoy playing some SuperTuxKart, but I also enjoy keeping up with its development and seeing changes immediately as they are pushed. Random PPAs will try their best, but if you really want everything, you will need to use the svn repository directly. I will give basic instructions for Ubuntu here, but whatever your distro is, the options are most likely similar.

First you will have to install svn, which is as simple as issuing

sudo apt-get install svn

Next there will be some prerequisites you will have to install. Since I did all this a few weeks, I will not be able to provide the exact details of what you will need, but you may find this page useful for that. Some things to keep in mind here is that when during compiling (see later) you get an error complaining about missing files, you will most likely have to install a library and its source files (for this you will need the libraryname-dev package in the Ubuntu repos, obviously substituting the proper library name). If you are stuck on a particular issue you can always post here. Be sure to keep in mind that

aptitude search <name>

is your friend.

When you think you have got all the proper libraries installed, it is time to continue with the actual installation. Open a terminal and decide where you will want to install this repo build. Things like /opt, $HOME or /usr/local come to mind. I decided to install it in my home directory so we will work with that in this example.

Create a new directory and go in it

mkdir supertuxkart
cd supertuxkart

Here, we will download all the source files using svn, issue

svn co https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supertuxkart supertuxkart/trunk

Files will start downloading and this can take some time. After this has finished, go into trunk/. It is time to build everything. First we have to generate the configure file.

./autogen.sh

Next comes the usual configure, make (, make install) sequence.

./configure

If all went correctly, you can now compile the game

make

This will take some time, entertain yourself for the next 15 minutes or so. When it is done, you can either start playing immediately by doing src/supertuxkart or you can choose to properly install the game into the appropriate system folders with sudo make install.

A few days later you may be in the mood to play again, but you will still want to use the most up to date version. Luckily enough you will not have to redownload and recompile everything, svn and make are smart enough to only do the absolute necessary. Update your local files to match the ones in the repository with

svn up

Then build everything again with

./autogen.sh && ./configure && make

Happy gaming!