1. Have you tried my wiki for Maxima?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Maxima
2. Have you at least configured with
./configure --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr
3. I have just joined the MOTU-Science team for Ubuntu and in the future
will be pushing for the latest release of Maxima to be included in the
official repositories and Backports.
4. GCL works well for compiling Maxima. There should really be no
problems using the other flavors of Lisp.