If you are a LTS user like me and stuck on Hardy Heron, sometimes packages are availible that have the newest shiniest thing prepackaged for you. Emacs 23 can be installed with a simple
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk
and then I wrote a little script to launch emacs with my favorite font:
#!/bin/sh exec emacs-snapshot \ -fn "Monospace-11" "$@"
* * *
Another bleeding-edge thing to check out is Google Chrome’s native Linux edition. Go get it from this page.