First install the build dependencies, you can do this simply by asking apt for the dependencies, first you need to make sure the source code section of software sources is set up:

• How do I enable the source code repositories?

Then install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get build-dep inkscape

Then you want to pull the source, in this case we don' t need the entire history for the project so we'll just do a lightweight checkout, this can still take a while:

bzr co --lightweight lp:inkscape

Then we need to cd into the directory and build it

cd inkscape

./autogen.sh

./configure

make

sudo make install

This will build Inkscape and install it into /usr/local/bin/inkscape by default.