These simple steps have been tested building Audacity 2.x on Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) and onwards including 13.04 (raring). The steps should also work with appropriate modification on most other Debian-based systems and for most legacy 1.3 versions of Audacity.
Open a terminal and type the following commands:
sudo apt-get install subversion svn checkout http://audacity.googlecode.com/svn/audacity-src/trunk/ audacity-read-only sudo apt-get build-dep audacity sudo apt-get install cmake (currently required for building Audacity 2.0.3-alpha from HEAD) cd audacity-read-only ./configure sudo make install
This should now give you the Audacity program at usr/local/bin and the plug-ins at usr/local/share/audacity.
On occasions, changes to latest Audacity HEAD may require you to regenerate the configure file before running it. To do this
sudo apt-get install autogen chmod +x ./autogen.sh ./autogen.sh