For the Greenstone2 version, see Compiling Greenstone2.

Note: You need java from the sun website, not from the sun-java6-jdk package.

Download a jdk binary installer from the sun website to a location like ~/jdk-6u5-linux-i586.bin. Then install java:

chmod +x ~/jdk-6u5-linux-i586.bin
cd /usr/local
sudo ~/jdk-6u5-linux-i586.bin
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk1.6.0_05
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Install some required packages

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion ant autoconf
sudo apt-get upgrade

Checkout and install Greenstone3

svn co http://svn.greenstone.org/greenstone3/trunk greenstone3
cd greenstone3
ant
gedit build.properties
  (edit as needed, changing port number for tomcat, etc)
ant prepare install