Lycid Lynx’ repository by default set to install Mercurial 1.4.x, which is great, but as of today that’s already 3 major releases behind 
To get yourself on the latest and greatest version of Mercurial there are 2 options: build from the source or just add mercurial-releases repository like this:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mercurial-ppa/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mercurial
Make sure it did the right thing:
$ hg --version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 1.6)
Copyright (C) 2005-2010 Matt Mackall and others
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Another thing that will go nicely with Mercurial 1.6.x or 1.7.x is up-to-date TortoiseHg. To install TortoiseHg on Ubuntu 10.04 you’ll need to run the following:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tortoisehg-ppa/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tortoisehg-nautilus
Thanks for the post. Was great for me. Thanks so much. I’m from Brazil.
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worked like a charm
Thanks very much. I was looking everywhere for this! I was trying to install from .tar.gz but was having no luck. Finally installed now. Thanks, Pete (Ireland)
Geniously simple
Worked for Hg 1.8 and Ubuntu 10.04.
Thanks very much!
If you get this error:
Exception in thread Thread-1:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python2.6/threading.py”, line 532, in __bootstrap_inner
self.run()
File “/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/softwareproperties/ppa.py”, line 59, in run
self.add_ppa_signing_key(self.ppa_path)
File “/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/softwareproperties/ppa.py”, line 88, in add_ppa_signing_key
print “Error reading %s: %s” % (lp_url, e)
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xd0 in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)
Just set up an htpp_proxy environment variable:
sudo -i
export http_proxy=’http://192.168.253.101:8080′
export https_proxy=’http://192.168.253.101:8080′
apt-add-repository ppa:mercurial-ppa/releases
Thanks so much for this post. Quick and efficient solution. Perfect.
If you get an error that add-apt-repository isn’t installed, make sure you install the appropriate package, python-software-properties for 10.04 LTS and many prior versions according to sources.
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
It did work like a charm with mercurial 1.9.1 on Lucid LTS. Thanks!
Thanks for that. Time-saver!
Thanks for this! Worked beautifully for me, and explained everything I needed. Cheers.
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This is still the clearest description I’ve found. It works perfectly, even though we’re on something like Hg 2.3.2 now.
Isn’t it crazy that after 2 years we’re still running into this kinda of stuff with Ubuntu?!..
We all are dealing with ubuntu past versions, I used this command on 10.04 Lucid Lynx and installed Mercurial 2.5.2
Thanks, worked perfectly!