Compiling Maxima from source.
As of 21st Dec 2015 the following has been used to compile Maxima from source.
If you compile Maxima from source you must include unicode support. This is essential even if you only use Maxima in English. Students' answers, and teacher's content, increasingly uses unicode which inevitably passes through Maxima.
You will need the following, and GNU autotools
sudo apt-get install texinfo
Download and compile SBCL (Lisp)
cd /home/sangwinc/src
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/sbcl/sbcl/1.3.1/sbcl-1.3.1-source.tar.bz2
tar -xf sbcl-1.3.1-source.tar.bz2
cd sbcl-1.3.1/
./make-config.sh
./make.sh
sudo ./install.sh
Download and compile Maxima
cd /home/sangwinc/src
wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/project/maxima/Maxima-source/5.36.1-source/maxima-5.36.1.tar.gz
tar -zxf maxima-5.36.1.tar.gz
cd maxima-5.36.1/
./configure --with-sbcl
make
sudo make install