The information contained in the article Compiling Blender for Kubuntu 7.10 are still relevant, but recently Jesterking (Nathan Letwory) introduced scons-local of the latest version supported. The reason behind that is that a lot of people were complaining about the shift to SCons 1.0.0 as a new requirement, which proved to be a problem with some distributions, while a manual installation of the latest Scons looked difficult also for some people.

Read "Compiling Blender: important new upgrade!"