It happens. The specific software version you want is an RPM package. If there's no source to be found worth compiling, you can always resort to creating a DEB file from the RPM package.

First you need the necessary software on the machine:

sudo apt-get install build-essential alien dpkg-dev debhelper 

The app you need is Alien. Now that you have installed it you can use it to convert RPM's to DEB files as follows:

sudo alien package.rpm

And that's it! You can install the DEB, as you probably know, with DPKG; the package management tool from Debian / Ubuntu. The syntax for installing DEB's with DPKG is the following:

sudo dpkg -i package.deb