The installation is very simple once emacs is already installed and the emacs init file is located. Simple add the script patch from someone's blog as I did at the bottom of my ~/.emacs.d/init.el file.
;; Add a package manager, el-get:
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get")
(unless (require 'el-get nil t)
(url-retrieve
"https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el"
(lambda (s)
(end-of-buffer)
(eval-print-last-sexp))))
After making this change, I saved (C-x C-s) then closed (C-x c) emacs and restarted to execute the new patch. That was sufficient in my case because I am not yet running emacs as a server daemon. When I restarted I received a small buffer full of error messages because I hadn't yet taken care of the prerequisite.
The script's url-retrieve requires git for the el-get-install.el to execute the installation. This git installation can be accomplished on Ubunut with
sudo apt-get install git
after which I shut down and restarted emacs.
This time I received a buffer reading
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/maurice/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get/.git/ Switched to a new branch '3.stable' Branch 3.stable set up to track remote branch 3.stable from origin. Congrats, el-get is installed and ready to serve!