Had to recently use xspim for a course in computer architecture.
The program simulates R2000 and R3000 processors, and was written by James R. Larus. The MIPS machine language is often taught in college-level assembly courses.
First you want to grab the required packages:
sudo apt-get install flex bison byacc libx11-dev libxaw7-dev build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`
Download the xspim simulator from Larus’s website: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/spim.html and navigate to the directory you extracted it in.
Now for xspim you need to navigate to the xspim sub directory and simply:
xmkmf
make
sudo make install
Now you will be able to launch the xspim simulator from the terminal by typing ‘xspim’.
A thing to note about using xspim on your machine: In our course we do most of our demonstrations on the Solaris machines which have Big Endian processors, on my laptop I am using a Pentium T9400, which is x86, which is Little Endian. There may be some problems with programs that you write, I have not experienced any differences yet. Good Luck!
Resources:
Endianness (Wikipedia)