Here the basic installation of Sawfish 1.8.1 under Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.1a (Squeeze) is described, but it's almost the same for practically every GNU/Linux. *BSD, Solaris or other Unixoids might require additional steps. Caution: This is a raw installation into /usr/local without package manager, and it is not recommended, if your distribution provides reasonably up-do-date packages or if you're inexperienced. If you proceed, first uninstall the packages coming from your distribution, if you don't do so, you'll very likely run into trouble.