Did exactly as you said - uninstalled and re-installed VICE cutting and pasting the commands from your guide above directly to the terminal. Same problem re-occurs.
Here's a cut and paste from my Terminal showing me running the x64 command.
brent@Brent-Lubuntu:~/Downloads$ x64
getting symbol guess_format failed!
*** VICE Version 2.3 ***
OS compiled for: Linux
GUI compiled for: GTK+
CPU compiled for: 80386
Compiler used: GCC-4.7.1
Current OS: not yet implemented
Current CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Pentium D/Pentium Extreme Edition/Celeron/Xeon/Xeon MP
Welcome to x64, the free portable C64 Emulator.
Current VICE team members:
D. Lem, A. Matthies, M. Pottendorfer, S. Trikaliotis, M. van den Heuvel,
C. Vogelgsang, F. Gennari, D. Kahlin, A. Lankila, Groepaz, I. Korb,
E. Smith, O. Seibert.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
See the "About VICE" command for more info.
XRandR: XRandR reports current display: 1920x1080@50
Loading system file `/usr/lib/vice/C64/kernal'.
Received signal 4.
Exiting...
brent@Brent-Lubuntu:~/Downloads$
I don't know if this is important or not, but my main menu (start bar thingy) doesn't have an applications folder. So I never see any VICE icons in my start bar.
Again, there doesn't seem to have been a .vice folder or sub-folders created in my "/home/brent" folder. There simply aren't any vice related folders there. Should these have been created during the installation? Even showing hidden folders does not reveal a .vice folder or subfolders.