Installing Erlang R15B from source in Ubuntu Oneiric

Download and extract Erlang source code:

wget http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R15B.tar.gz
tar xfvz otp_src_R15B.tar.gz

Install c compiler, make, git and other needed tools to compile just about anything C based in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install build-essential git-core libwxgtk2.8-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libpng3 wx-common default-jre default-jdk fop

Install Erlang build dependencies, this is a shortcut to not having to wonder what dependencies are needed to build Erlang from source

sudo apt-get build-dep erlang

Build and install erlang

./configure
make
make docs
sudo make install
sudo make install-docs