I've been compiling wget from source on machines for a long time because of the production version's inability to parse CSS @import and @url commands. Thankfully, Ted Mielczarek has a patched version that supports them. Rumor is, this will be included in wget 1.12.

I had trouble getting this to compile today on an Ubuntu Hardy machine. The issue turned out to be a missing dependency: flex. The following series of commands should work from a fresh install:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wget
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get build-dep wget
sudo apt-get install flex


After that, you should be able to run ./configure, make and make install from Ted's source directory.