1) Download and untar maven
tar -xzf apache-maven-3.1.0-bin.tar.gz
ln -s apache-maven-3.1.0/ maven
2) Put it in your path (via ~/.bashrc)
export JDK_HOME=/home/chris/java
export JAVA_HOME=$JDK_HOME        
export M2_HOME=/home/chris/maven
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$M2_HOME/bin:$PATH
3) Quickly create a maven project template
mkdir myproj
cd myproj
mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.mycompany.app -DartifactId=my-app \
-DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false
4) Make a couple of useful additions to pom.xml
<properties>
   <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
</properties>

<build>  
 <plugins>
   <plugin>
     <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
     <version>3.0</version>
     <configuration>
         <source>1.8</source>
         <target>1.8</target>
     </configuration>
   </plugin>
 </plugins>
</build>
5) Compile it
mvn compile