I have used Sonar from the start and in windows (ha ha) you just click on the .exe and most of the time everything goes ok.
I want to test out this new app but I haven’t a clue.
I have installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.6 as of yesterday Sat Apr.22 and I want to try to use a delta 66 from m-audio…and I think I saw driver support for this card.
Sonar doesn’t offer inter-application audio routing, which means that it does all audio I/O itself, and there is no need to understand much about your computer in order to make it work - its all inside Sonar.
Ardour is a part of the JACK “universe” which allows it to share audio with other applications as well as the audio hardware. See http://ardour.org/jack for a more in-depth overview of JACK.
Your delta 66 is supported on Linux by ALSA (the equivalent of ASIO or WDM), and therefore works with JACK (and by extension, with Ardour and all other JACK clients).
A forum is pretty useless environment to try to provide the help you need. I suggest you come hang out with us on IRC at freenode.net in the #ardour channel, where a variety of people can offer real-time hand holding as you get things started up for the first time.