Open up a Terminal from the Ubuntu desktop (Ctrl + Alt + T). We first update the apt repository as follows:

sudo apt-get update

Now we can install everything we need for CUDA with one additional line:

sudo apt-get install build-essential binutils gdb eclipse-cdt

Here, build-essential is the package with the gcc and g++ compilers, and other utilities such as make; binutils has some generally useful utilities, such as the LD linker, gdb is the debugger, and Eclipse is the IDE that we will be using.

Let's also install a few additional dependencies that will allow us to run some of the graphical (OpenGL) demos included with the CUDA Toolkit with this line:

sudo apt-get install freeglut3 freeglut3-dev libxi-dev libxmu-dev

Now you should be good to go to install the CUDA Toolkit.