It seems obvious that a new stable ubuntu distro should work fine with new 64-bit PCs.
Anyway I have lost sometime to fix the correct installation of ia32-libs, a compatibility package that aims to help in amd64/i386 issues on Ubuntu.
It depends on a meta-package called ia32-libs-multiarch (it is pratically an empty package..) that for some reason would not install on my fresh installed 12.10.
Running dpkg did not solve. In fact apt-get found some integrity problem and asked me to remove the added packages.
I was thinking to downgrade to 12.04, at least to have an usable distro, so I have changed in my apt sources.list quantal to precise and added i386 architecture too (dpkg –add-architecture i386): this second command lets the distro have a knowledge base over all packages.
Anyway, taking the old packages did not solve the issue, but the package database was filled with all infos. I have changed back the sources (precise to quantal) and after a new apt-get update I was able to install ia32-libs with all dependencies correctly.