How to install and keep updated most recent versions of blender in ubuntu

Question

Blender is a perfect piece of software with many brillian changes in each minor release. But often most recent versions of ubuntu does not have latest versions of blender.

Answer 1

So here is a relatively simple way of having latest version of blender in your ubuntu distribution.

1) visit http://www.blender.org/ and find appropriate version of latest blender package (64bit or 32bit for linux) in download section and save it somewhere on your filesystem.

2) I assume that it's not a problem for you to have two additional items in your home directory.

cd ~
tar -xvjf Downloads/blender-2.65a-linux-glibc211-x86_64.tar.bz2
ln -s blender-2.65a-linux-glibc211-x86_64 blender

3) Add item to the menu:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications

Then edit with your favorite editor ~/.local/share/applications/blender.desktop and save it with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Blender
Comment=3d design/modelling suite
Icon=/home/USER/blender/icons/32x32/apps/blender.png
Exec=/home/USER/blender/blender
Categories=Graphics

Don't forget to change /home/USER/ with your home directory.

4) When new version of blender will be released all you have to do is to download it, extract and renew symlink ~/blender to point to the new version of blender:

rm ~/blender
ln -s ~/blender-most-recent-version ~/blender

Answer 2

I suggest you add this blender ppa as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:irie/blender

Followed by sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install blender

From now on, any updates to the ppa should be offered automatically.