Compiling ngSPICE on Ubuntu 12.04

Wanting to install the latest version of ngSPICE on the new Ubuntu 12.04 box, i ran into a little trouble. The first is that ngSPICE is a very powerful interactive software, but the plain vanilla command line is really painful to use because it does not support backspace and arrow keys. The fix for this is to use the GNU readline library. Unfortunately, without the correct X packages installed, you will end up with a functioning installation of ngSPICE that cannot plot data, complaining that it "Cannot open viewport". The fix for this is to install the following packages:

Install autoconf and libtool  if you are running autogen.sh


Install bison, else configure will not run.

For GNU Readline support, install libreadline6, libreadline6-dev
For Plotting, install: libxaw7, libxaw7-dev, libx11-6, libx11-dev

Then run ./configure --with-readline

Then make and then [sudo] make install...