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 notes about the combination of Amber11, AmberTools1.5 and Ubuntu 11.04.