There are two main methods for installing Bluefish: Compile from source or install a binary package. Binary installation is easiest, so we will cover that first. There are a few different approaches, caused by the differences between systems. We will start off by summarizing a few really quick and simple approaches before dealing with this problem more extensively.
Debian: run su - && apt-get update && apt-get install bluefish
Red Hat, Mandrake (and other Linux distributions that support rpm): Download the latest .rpm from the Bluefish website
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD distribute Bluefish through their packaging systems.
To compile, or install on another platform, see Section 4, “Installing a Bluefish Source Distribution”.