So on Monday evening Chris rang me and asked for help installing Ubuntu on his (old) Thinkpad; apparently, to use some of his audio hardware under Windows he’d need to upgrade to XP, which would’ve been painful. So he brought his laptop around and we spent the rest of the evening setting it up. It’s mostly gone very smoothly—Xubuntu plus the UbuntuStudio collection, including a realtime kernel. His goal is to be able to produce music on that machine as easily as he could on Windows; with a little luck, it’ll just be a case of getting used to the new software.