Prerequisites:

You'll need to have these libraries (with equivalent devel versions) to build Wesnoth:

 libsdl1.2.7
 libsdl-image1.2 (with png support)
 libsdl-mixer1.2 (with Vorbis support)
 libsdl-net
 libsdl-ttf2.0.8
 libz
 boost_iostreams >= 1.33.0
 boost_regex >= 1.33.0

You will need the following tools:
 
 python2.4
 scons

SDL* libraries can be found at http://www.libsdl.org . libfreetype can be found
at http://www.freetype.org/ . python can be found at http://www.python.org .
The boost libraries can be found at http://www.boost.org .

You will also need to have a working installation of GNU gettext to build the
translations.

Note: It has been reported (see https://gna.org/bugs/index.php?10326)
that under gcc 3.3.6 you need to turn off optimizations or you will
get a build that doesn't work for multiplayer.  We recommend building
with gcc 4.

If you see lots of messages like "Type 'svnversion --help' for usage.",
you have a Subversion client installed but it is not implementing the 
-n option of svnversion. Time to update it.

Sourcecode:

You can get it here:

 http://www.wesnoth.org/downloads


Compiling:

First untar the package:

 $ tar xfjv wesnoth-x.y.z.tar.bz2

then

 $ cd wesnoth-x.y.z

Simply type 'scons' in the top-level directory to build game, editor,
and tools.  It is possible to select individual targets by naming them
as scons arguments, including wesnothd (the Wesnoth multiplayer server)
and campaignd (the campaign server).

scons takes a prefix= argument that says where to install the game
and its data.  The prefix defaults to /usr/local; for production builds
you may want to set prefix=/usr.

To build wesnothd:

   scons server_uid=<user> server_group=<group> wesnothd

where <user> and <group> are valid on your system.  A wesnothd
subdirectory will be created under /var/run owned by
<user>:<group>. This is relevant if you want to be able to communicate
with wesnothd through a FIFO or named socket.  You have to run
wesnothd with the user specified while configuring in order for it to
work.  You can also specify the FIFO directory directly by using
fifodir=<directory>.

If you want to install several versions of wesnoth you should use the
prefsdir= parameter to get distinct preferences directories.  The
default is '.wesnoth'.

Notes on the deprecated autotools build:

The autotools build machinery is deprecated, unsupported, and will be
removed in a future release.  You will need autoconf (>= 2.60) and
automake (>= 1.9). Run './autogen.sh' to generate the configure
files.  Then 

 $ ./configure
 $ make
 $ make install

as usual.  See './configure --help' for all available options.
You should clean your existing wesnoth release build first with:

 $ make distclean

If you want to clean your wesnoth SVN build do:

 $ make maintainer-clean