It was some time ago (8 months or so). I remember googling around and finding different approaches to setting up the tool chain. The notes I kept on some of the steps I tried to get Clojure working on emacs included the following (not the whole list of commands):

Setting up Clojure

Followed the gist of http://riddell.us/ClojureSwankLeiningenWithEmacsOnLinux.html (no longer existing) The first time, invoking 'mvn2 install' to build clojure-contrib jar failed. Later, after cleaning up Java, it worked.

Java was already installed, so I apt-get installed ant and maven2

  ~$ git clone git://github.com/clojure/clojure.git
  ~$ git clone git://github.com/clojure/clojure-contrib.git 
  ~$ mvn install
  Copy jline-0.0.94.jar

Create a bash script called clj to start clojure with these commands:

  #!/bin/sh
  # without jline
  #java -cp "$CLOJURE_HOME/clojure-1.3.0.jar" clojure.main "$@"
  # with jline
  java -cp "$CLOJURE_HOME/jline-0.9.94.jar:$CLOJURE_HOME/clojure-1.4.0.jar" jline.ConsoleRunner clojure.main

Running clj in the terminal worked, with the repl functioning as expected.

For emacs:

  ~$ sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk

SLIME, clojure-mode and leiningen

  git clone git://github.com/nablaone/slime.git
  git clone git://github.com/technomancy/clojure-mode.git
  ~$ wget --no-check-certificate http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/raw/stable/bin/lein

Execute the leiningen script

  ~$ chmod +x lein
  ~$ ./lein self-install

For some reason, this didn't work in emacs and I opted instead to run Clojure in jEdit. It worked but I didn't quite like the jEdit look and feel. Anyway, the long and the short of it was I played with Clojure mainly in jEdit for a while.

As you said, the setup process was not well documented at that time and it was quite frustrating. I'm sure it's better now. I'm going to play with Clojure in Light Table again, and if it excites me, I'll have another go at a full Clojure install.