A bit of Googling leads to this bug for bitcoin
in Ubuntu, which has this Ubuntu MoTU mailing list post. This passage, at the end, explains it:
For these reasons and others, including the Bitcoin software in any stable,
no-updates release is not a good thing for Ubuntu users nor for the bitcoin
network as a whole. There is already a PPA, maintained by Matt Corallo, one
of the core developers, and linked to from http://bitcoin.org/en/download.
Said PPA provides both the Bitcoin software and the BDB 4.8 packages needed
for wallet compatibility with the software on other platforms. Over at
Debian, their Bitcoin Packaging Team has been maintaining the package,
keeping it in the unstable branch (sid) only, where it is allowed to be
updated with new releases of the software. It is not included in the stable
repository (wheezy), nor in testing (jessie). If I understand correctly,
Ubuntu doesn't have that kind of release. It is my opinion that, given
Ubuntu's methods of managing its software, it would be better to not
include Bitcoin in the Ubuntu repositories, unless exceptions to the
policies could be made, allowing all supported Ubuntu versions to get the
latest updates as they come down from upstream. As a first step, the
Bitcoin software should be removed from Trusty's repositories, assuming no
exception can be made. Ideally, it would also be removed from the older
repositories (Precise, Quantal, Raring, Saucy) if it can't be updated,
though I'm told that's significantly harder from the perspective of the
standard workflows.
The PPA mentioned is https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/ubuntu/bitcoin.
As for cgminer
and bfgminer
, from what I understand, bitcoind
is the daemon behind the Bitcoin wallet (and the CLI interface), and not a miner by itself. And cgminer
is one of the more popular mining software out there.