I just realized that the start-up music for Ubuntu is a variation on the start-up music for Windows XP. (You can hear the Ubuntu theme in this video at around 0:10 [Update: video has been removed]. The Windows XP theme is in this video at around 1:16.) If you don’t hear the similarity, concentrate on the rhythm rather than the melody.
The Ubuntu music style is African, like the word ubuntu. It was influenced by Windows, like the Ubuntu user interface, but it’s a new composition.
I’ve been running Ubuntu on a virtual machine. The sound quality was so bad that I never clearly heard Ubuntu start up. But I recently installed Ubuntu on a physical machine and heard the start-up music clearly for the first time.
Which virtual machine software are you using? I’ve been hooked on VMWare for a while now.
I use VMWare. Maybe the sound is better once it has started, but on start up the sound is terribly garbled.
I run it on VirtualBox, and the sound is just fine.
The host OS is also Linux, though.