keep in mind these tools probably won't work as well in ubuntu for lack of patches and such but if you're like me and the only way you could use linux was to use ubuntu because of windows 8 then this is for you.
I came here to recommend Kali Linux, but Zanginator already beat me to it. Basically, BT5 is outdated. Kali is new, fast, and full-featured. Also, Ubuntu is a terrible OS. Canonical has included features in 12.10 (ever since v. 11.04) that send your search histories to Amazon to target ads :| Not cool. Linux Mint is much better than Ubuntu, and Arch is better than everything. Kali is a great OS for pentesting, or a quick and easy way to 'hack' without knowing what the hell you are doing.
I actually really wanted kali but windows 8 wouldn't allow me to boot from a cd or usb for it because of secure boot/uefi. I literally tried everything for like a week and a half and ended up having to settle with ubuntu or fedora so I chose ubuntu. the only way I might have been able to do it was if I bought a copy of windows 7 and tried boothing through that and I'm not even sure that will work.
i mean from what i've learned so far you can "hack" on any operating system as long as you know what you're doing, which for me means it'll take longer to learn (with alot of googling involved) but eventually i'll be able to achieve the same result. as for vm's they were laggy on my old system but maybe they will work better on my new computer I haven't tried yet