So, after having a little time to audition Ubuntu, I decided to resize a Windows partition and install Ubuntu Studio. (I actually used the Ubuntu installer to re-partition, after some frustration with abortive efforts to create a GParted LiveUSB. Using the Ubuntu installer went off surprisingly well and easy, and, thankfully, I didn’t lose any data on the NTFS partition that donated the space.)
The installer for Studio is not nearly as slick as the Ubuntu install. It’s a text-based installer, which looks positively retro these days; as a former Slackware user, I was actually amused by this, at first.
I also had a serious problem. The Ubuntu Studio installer choked at the “scanning the mirror” stage. I waited an hour before going to bed, assuming it was working with no indication of progress. When I woke up this morning, it was still stuck at the same point. After reading a forum post about one user’s similar problem on an older release of Ubuntu, I switched to another virtual terminal and killed the installer processes (the last 3). This caused the installer to get back on track, asking what general sets of packages I’d like to install. Eventually, the install completed without further incident.
I had previously tried installing a number of the Ubuntu Studio packages, including the realtime Linux kernel, on my Ubuntu install under Wubi. Disk space quickly became an issue; though a virtual disk was in use, it seemed non-trivial to resize it, and moving /usr to a new virtual partition seems to have failed. I was not particularly impressed at the cryptic failure messages from Synaptic; I imagine a newbie would be positively bewildered. More graceful and obvious errors would go a long way here. On the other hand, I did create a fairly small virtual partition (only 5G) in the first place.
