Thank you! Years ago you encouraged me to have the confidence to put Ubuntu on a netbook, and that time it went really smoothly, but the hardware eventually failed. It shouldn't be too hard to do it again. I think for the time being I won't take you up on your offer of sending me a bootable stick, because I want to see if I can in fact make one of my own and if I can't, try to understand why not. I'm not in sharks territory yet, I have encountered a minor setback and I definitely want to have another attempt before I give up.