How to install new version of Blender in Ubuntu

The version of Blender that ships with Ubuntu is almost always old. This is a problem because a lot of Blender addons available on the web are continuously updated to work with only the most recent versions. To be able to use these addons, you need to install a more recent version of Blender. Thankfully, there are many PPAs that offer recent builds of Blender for most Ubuntu versions.

First, I uninstalled the default version of Blender. Next, I added the PPA ppa:irie/blender maintained by Irie Shinsuke and updated. Finally, I installed Blender from the PPA. The whole process takes only a few steps:

$ sudo apt-get remove blender
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:irie/blender
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install blender

On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, with this upgrade I went from Blender 2.62 to 2.69 easily 😊