Are you just trying to run the program or do you really need to compile it? There's a 32-bit linux binary that can be run on 64-bit ubuntu if you "sudo apt-get ia32-libs".
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.2.0-linux.tar.gz/download
I recently updated the SVN for building on 64-bit Karmic with wxWidgets 2.9.0. This was after the 0.2.0 release. The 0.2.0 release did not build on 64-bit yet.
Unfortunately there currently isn't a -dev deb package of either of the versions of wxWidgets that we can use. On Karmic they only have the UTF-16 version. We need either the ANSI (libwxgtk2.8-ansi-dev) version or the UTF-8 (wxWidgets 2.9.0) version. We're moving towards 2.9.0.
I know you said you didn't want VM, but as a last resort, last I checked the Windows version runs fine in Wine.