Unfortunally it seems as if ubuntu still uses build10 as standard, but that’s a very old version. You should at least install build12 or even better compile you own widelands-build from svn.

Build 12 for ubutu can be downloaded here: http://getdeb.net/app/Widelands

for compiling your own build, I copied some lines from http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Spiele/Widelands :

first open a terminnal and install all needed packages:
sudo apt-get install build-essential python libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev gettext libiconv-hook-dev zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libpngwriter0-dev scons libstdc++6-dev libgcc1 exuberant-ctags optipng libboost-dev

than change to a directory you want to dowload widelands to and run:
svn co https://widelands.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/widelands/trunk ./

with the following two commands you than compile widelands and the localisation for other languages than English:
scons build=release install_prefix=. bindir=. datadir=. localedir=./locale
python ./utils/buildlocale.py

and final you can start your selfcompiled version with
./widelands

Cheers
Nasenbaer