How to compile/build QEMU 1.4.0 on Ubuntu 12.04

Download QEMU

The sources can be found here: http://wiki.qemu-project.org/download/qemu-1.4.0.tar.bz2

wget http://wiki.qemu-project.org/download/qemu-1.4.0.tar.bz2

Install dependencies

This is what I needed to install, however you might require extra dependencies that were already installed on my system and are thus not on this list .

General build tools:

sudo apt-get install build-essential bzr bzr-builddeb cdbs \
    debhelper devscripts dh-make diff dpatch fakeroot \
    gnome-pkg-tools gnupg liburi-perl lintian patch patchutils \
    pbuilder piuparts quilt ubuntu-dev-tools wget

QEMU dependencies:

sudo apt-get install \
    libglib2.0-dev libsdl1.2-dev libjpeg-dev libvde-dev \
    libvdeplug2-dev libbrlapi-dev libaio-dev libfdt-dev texi2html \
    texinfo info2man pod2pdf libnss3-dev libcap-dev libattr1-dev \
    gcc-4.6-multilib

To be sure you have everything you can also do a sudo apt-get build-dep qemu, even though the Ubuntu 12.04 has an outdated version of QEMU.