I have Ardour installed from the software center in Ubuntu, but their version is not the latest. I have no idea how to “build” Ardour. Is there a software package available of the latest version to download and install without having to become a computer scientist?
there is no official package for any of the linux distros.
i’m pretty sure though that there is somebody out there that builds ardour for ubuntu (the latest version) try searching for “ardour 2.8.10 ubuntu package” or similar. on ubuntu you have ardour 2.8.8 afaik which is pretty recent. and building is not to hard either, try:
http://ardour.org/download_full
good luck!
there is a ppa with many audio applications, plugins, realtime kernels etc for 10.04 (this link is published in a topic in this forum somewhere):
https://launchpad.net/~falk-t-j/+archive/lucid/
but please, remember to make some donation to this project if you use ardour, so it can be bigger! 
You don’t really need to be a computer scientist but maybe you can earn that “compile ardour” scout badge yourself.
You’ll have to open a terminal window and type a few commands. On Ubuntu you can get all the dependencies for building ardour simply by
sudo apt-get build-dep ardour
which pulls in all sorts of libraries (this may take some time…)
Then once you’ve paid your contribution and downloaded and unpacked the source package, just do:
<pre>
cd wherever_you_have_put_the_source_code
scons
and watch all sorts of geeky messages scroll by for a long time on a slow computer it can an hour or so). In the end you should see the message “done building targets”. If not, well, maybe that’s a good time to give up. Otherwise, finally type
sudo scons install
All in all not too complicated. Well actually it’s way too complicated for most computer users but then, so is operating ardour.
Make sure you run the newly-built ardour rather than the ubuntu-package one, you can add a launcher to the menu yourself which points to “/usr/local/bin/ardour2”
when installing ardour to ubunto my competer reports(in Finnish):
File “/home/asennus/lataukset/ardour-5,10,0-x86-64.run” when opening has been an error. there’s 'try again 'and ‘modify nevertheless’ buttons but nothing happends if i push them.
This error message is unknown. This thread is 7 years old. There should be no commas in the Ardour version. It does not sound as if you are running the installation according to the steps given at https://ardour.org/first_time_linux.html