slimeslurp

Here is how I went about building a version of Emacs that has XFT support on Ubuntu 6.06.

Install the latest GTK Emacs snapshot:
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk

Check out the emacs-unicode-2 branch into /opt:
cd /opt

sudo cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co -remacs-unicode-2 emacs

Configure and build:

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-font-backend --with-xft --with-freetype --with-gtk --x-includes=/usr/include/X11 --x-libraries=/usr/lib/X11

sudo make bootstrap

sudo make

Update /etc/alternatives to point to the new binary:
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/emacs

sudo ln -s /opt/emacs/src/emacs /etc/alternatives/emacs

References:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/XftGnuEmacs

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1051268&postcount=53

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki?action=browse;oldid=EmacsCvs;id=EmacsFromCVS