I decided to go with Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit this time on my newest development VM.  But when first starting the DB2 9.7 install (db2setup), I got the following errors:

WARNING:
The 32 bit library file libstdc++.so.6 is not found on the system.
32-bit applications may be affected.
ERROR:
The required library file libaio.so.1 is not found on the system.

Those are the standard C++ and asynchronous I/O libraries.  My fingers were already a bit tired from sudo apt-get install‘ing and config’ing the world, but a couple more (with !s:s/… shortcuts) wouldn’t kill me, so:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++6
sudo apt-get install libaio-dev

… and I was off and running.

One of these days, someone will package an “everything you could possibly every need” distro to speed setup.  Why not, disk and bandwidth are cheap.  Until then, maybe I’ll script the whole thing or at least save off my baseline VM.