Appendix A. Installing Erlang
You can install Erlang several ways, depending on your operating system and your personal preferences. Erlang currently runs on modern versions of Windows, on Mac OS X, Linux, and most other UNIX-like operating systems, and on the VxWorks real-time operating system.
If your operating system is Windows, download and run the latest installer .exe file from www.erlang.org/download.html. This includes documentation and sets up menus and icons for starting the special werl shell on Windows (see section 2.1.1).
On Unix-like systems, you can build and install Erlang from source code, which is the best way to ensure that you have the latest version; or, on some systems, you can use a package manager such as Ubuntu’s synaptic to automatically download and install the official Erlang package for your system—but note that this may not be the latest release of Erlang. On Mac OS X, the current version of Erlang is available in the Homebrew package manager (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/).
Point your browser at www.erlang.org/download.html, and get the latest source package. After it downloads, un-tar the package, cd into the directory, and run the ./configure script. You can add a –-prefix=... flag if you want to install to a location other than the default, which is /usr/local/lib/erlang. For example: