Things we need to be able to use Scala on Debian (everything below will likely work on Ubuntu as well):

• Scala itself, of course. apt-get install scala will pull in a bunch of packages -- all the java stuff, etc. However, note that sbt will happily pull down whatever version of scala you specify in your build.sbt. While this step may not really be needed, I'm assuming that it at least ensures that scala's java-related requirements are met. For what it's worth, debian is currently shipping scala 2.9.2 in "testing" (jessie), and I'm targeting 2.10, so my builds aren't using the system scala libraries.

• sbt (simple build tool) is Scala's equivalent to make/Ant/Maven. Debian doesn't provide a package for sbt, but the sbt project produces a deb as part of the official release. Install curl first if you don't already have it, since sbt depends on it, and check the download page to make sure you're getting the latest version of sbt:

  $ sudo apt-get install curl
  $ wget http://repo.scala-sbt.org/scalasbt/sbt-native-packages/org/scala-sbt/sbt/0.13.0/sbt.deb
  $ sudo dpkg -i sbt.deb
  

• I'm planning on doing some work with Lift, and deploying via .war, so I need tomcat. On one site I'm going to be behind apache, so I'll set up for testing that way:

  $ sudo apt-get install tomcat7 apache2
  

That's all for now. I'll come back and update this if I disover other setup items I'd have rather had at the beginning.