I realize that in a way I am just restating what other people have said, but it seems very odd to me that this complaint would even come up in 2008. We are living in a time when Linux distributions have amazing package management that make Apple and Microsoft seem primitive in comparison. If your distribution can't do that, it's time to switch. I like Ubuntu personally. I have several different dialects of lisp installed and a slime environment in emacs. It took me a matter of literally seconds to install each one of them. Just apt-get install sbcl or if you're using a distribution that uses yum, then yum install sbcl. Or clisp, or whatever else you want to try using.