hello,
after battling along with this very same problem, luckily I found a working solution within the Second Life Wiki, here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linux_Viewer#64-bit
apparently, what happens is that at some point Ubuntu stopped providing support for ia32-libs and thus require now a different process for installing...
I tried the terminal commands suggested, and it has indeed worked for me:
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0:i386 libpangox-1.0-0:i386 libpangoxft-1.0-0:i386 libidn11:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio:i386
hope this helps, see you in SL...