All of Amber will compile and run on Ubuntu Linux platforms. For any recent version (say 8.04 or later), the following command should get you the needed optional packages:

sudo apt-get install csh flex gfortran g++ xorg-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev
(note that the penultimate library is "zlib-one-g", not "zlib-el-g")

If you want parallel, you can probably use the apt-get versions of MPI:

sudo apt-get install openmpi-bin

Some users might prefer mpich to openmpi. In that case:

sudo apt-get mpich2 libmpich2-dev

If you have trouble with these, go to $AMBERHOME/AmberTools/src, and execute either ./configure_openmpi or ./configure_mpich2.

Here are some additional notes, prepared by Mark Williamson. These have some specific instructions for the combination of Amber11, AmberTools1.5 and Ubuntu 11.04.

Instructions are generally the same as above, except that yum is used as a package manager. The following command should get you the needed libraries:

sudo yum install gcc flex tcsh zlib-devel bzip2-devel libXt-devel libXext-devel libXdmcp-devel