Correct way to install Mercurial on Ubuntu

Question

Just use:

sudo apt-get install mercurial

It should install it in the default folder and update your environment variables correctly. then you should be able to use 'hg' from the command line, just like svn, although Hg is a much better source control tool.

NEW ANSWER

Previously I was pointing to TortoiseHG PPA, which also contained Mercurial. For now (year 2015) the more recent version of Mercurial is in another PPA, specific for Mercurial only.

Important note: this version is incompatible with TortoiseHG, and Tortoise will be REMOVED, if you install the more recent Mercurial!

If you don't care of Tortoise and just want more recent Mercurial package, use next command to install:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:mercurial-ppa/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mercurial

However, this won't give you the absolutely latest version either. To enjoy the latest version, you may want to install it via PIP:

sudo apt-get install -y python-pip python-dev
sudo pip install mercurial --upgrade

This would give you the very latest version (3.6.2 vs 3.3.2 from the PPA). Seems this one is also not compatible with TortoiseHG from the repos.

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OLD ANSWER

Though available from default repos, the version there is outdated. At the time of writing: 2.2.2 vs 2.5.2. So I would recommend to use the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:tortoisehg-ppa/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mercurial tortoisehg

TortoiseHG is not required, but is recommended.

Yeah you can install it by just

sudo apt-get install mercurial

but for me it gave very old version (2.0.2). You can check this by hg version. To get the newer version you can do

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential
sudo easy_install -U mercurial

Now I have 3.0.1 version

aniket@ubuntu:~$ hg version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 3.0.1)
(see http://mercurial.selenic.com for more information)

Copyright (C) 2005-2014 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.

More details : Installing Mercurial on Linux

PS: Above link goes to my personal blog which has additional details.

Mercurial is available from the Universe repositories. Enable that repository in USC if it's not already enabled. Then just type the following into a terminal.

sudo apt-get install mercurial

The configuration file is saved in /etc/mercurial/hgrc You can configure mercurial by editing that file. To open that file in gedit type the following command

sudo gksudo gedit /etc/mercurial/hgrc

If you are using an older version of Ubuntu (12.04 perhaps?), use the Mercurial PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mercurial-ppa/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mercurial

As of this writing, this installs mercurial 3.0.1 on Ubuntu 12.04 for example.

just to let everyone know,
sudo apt-get install mercurial
is delivering version 3.0.1 (latest as the time of writing this post)
so no need to try other stuff as this is everything you'll need.

The Mercurial version in the Ubuntu repository is relatively old. I tried to use the PPA, to get more recent version. But Ubuntu complains that "The repository ... does not have a Release file" and disables it. Then I used alternative way to install latest Mercurial version:

sudo pip3 install mercurial --upgrade