I had some issues building BigCouch on Ubuntu. In the following, I'll describe one way how to get BigCouch installed on Ubuntu 10.04, with all depending packages installed from the Ubuntu main repository.

The first problem I encountered was that make failed because the SpiderMonkey headers were not found:

Could not find jsapi.h. Are Mozilla SpiderMonkey headers installed?
make: *** [compile] Error 1

To resolve this error, one needs to tell the build system the location of the xulrunner development library (i.e. Ubuntu package xulrunner-dev) and its respective include files, which can be achieved e.g. through the following patch:

Furthermore, you need to create a symbolic link /usr/lib/libmozjs.so, like e.g.:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.8/libmozjs.so /usr/lib/libmozjs.so

Finally, I encountered another issue when running make install. The installation aborted, as the spec generation failed. The problem was a symbolic link. Its deletion finally made the installation succeed:

sudo rm /usr/lib/erlang/man

Note that this description is only about one way how to get BigCouch installed on Ubuntu 10.04. On top of everything, it's a quite hackish way. If you have any suggestions how to improve this description, or if you know of any better alternative, please share it and consider leaving a comment!