John isn't always the fastest anymore, but it's definitely not very, very slow. It also provides the widest support by far. (And most of the formats are GPU accelerated, OpenMP threaded, or SSE parallelized. John itself also supports MPI. Make sure you've configured the makefile right.) If there's a format you're trying to crack, chances are john provides a convenient and reasonably fast way to crack it.
Not sure which one is in the Ubuntu repository. Although John the Ripper is Solar Designer's baby, most of the current development (under Solar's guidance) occurs in the "jumbo" version led by another developer named magnum.
