Recently upgraded my plain vanilla Ubuntu Jaunty to Ubuntu Studio. I was pretty worried that I would miss something, because Ubuntu Studio comes as a separate distribution. As it turned out, all I had to do was open synaptic and mark all the ubuntustudio packages to be installed, and wait all night.

In the morning, I rebooted my machine, worrying and wondering what effect the new realtime kernel would have, but Grub seemed to be oblivious. The realtime option wasn't even there. So after putzing around a bit, I found that in /boot/grub/menu.lst, I had instructed the automagic kernel list to only include the latest 2 kernel versions. This was mainly for aesthetic reasons (I don't like a whole list of stuff that I have to read before I can even boot), so I simply changed it to all, and ran sudo update-grub. On reboot, I had the realtime option. Now for the real thing!!!

Despite all my worry, nothing seems to be amiss. In fact, the UI is much more responsive than before, and I assume that it's just because the realtime kernel gives more importance to such things.

Some other issues I faced are:

• Login Window Face browser was disabled. Only had to re-enable it.
• Lots and lots of little clicks and beeps, pressing buttons, etc. At first I liked it, but then I decided to get rid of it, via the sound preference window.
• My nice semi-translucent gnome panel at the top has been themed: it is now a black 3d thing. I dont mind, but I liked it more simple.
• My sound hotkeys didn't work (volume buttons, etc.). This was fixed by changing the default mixer in sound properties.
• The Ubuntu Studio GDM theme is nice, but too electric. I dont want to get rid of the "human" (brown) in ubuntu. So I customized the theme to use a different highlite color, and the human icon set.
• I don't like the Ubuntu Studio Usplash theme (the bootup splash), so I uninstalled that package.
• Ubuntu Studio by default doesn't show removable drives on the desktop. I like that feature, and think it's a shame that people don't! This was fixed by diving into gconf-editor and changing the settings in apps>nautilus>desktop. While I was there, I disabled icons on buttons and in the menu. I find them visually distracting, but now that there not there, it takes a fraction of a second longer to look at a menu. Maybe I'll re-enable them in the future. EDIT: I re-enabled them.

Why did I do it?

1. I'm getting into sound production, and want to see what Foss can give me for it.
2. I use most of the programs in the ubuntu studio distribution (scribus, inkscape) anyway.
3. I finally get a working black theme (Ubuntu Studio GDM theme includes black or dark-themed controls).
4. I like the login prompt sound for Ubuntu Studio.
5. And other more trivial reasons.

Anyhow, just some food for thought, and a few pointers if google should throw some poor lost souls my way!