How to manually install VIM 7.3 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Remove the existing vim

sudo apt-get purge vim-*

sudo apt-get autoremove –purge

Download the vim sources

wget -P ~/ ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/vim-7.3.tar.bz2

tar xvfj ~/vim-7.3.tar.bz2

cd ~/vim73

install the libncurses libary

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev 

Compile Vim

 ./configure --with-features=huge --enable-gui=auto

cd src && make first

make

sudo make install