The machine is an Asus Pundit barebones, previously running standard 7.04. It has one IDE channel with the hard drive as master and the DVD as slave. I could boot off the DVD with no problem and proceed with the install right up to the point where it is about to start installing the base system, then I got a red screen with an error message "Cannot install the base system. The installer cannot figure out how to install the base system. No installable CD-ROM was found and no valid mirror was configured". If I hit Continue twice I get a list of options, one of which is "Check CD-ROM(s) integrity" - this works fine. It then does a few other things such as checking PCMCIA hardware, and at some point says it is going to install a Linux Floppy kernel driver. Since the machine has no floppy I deselect this and continue. It tries again to install the base system and this time succeeds. Strange.
Ubuntu Studio uses very special kernels. I've even had problems with one kernel in a virtual machine (VMware), but the same virtual machine ran without problems on another host system...
