I first used a computer in Hong Kong, as a journalist, in 1990 (PC-MS-DOS, later Windows 3.1). Had to learn it from scratch and on the fly. Had a very good instructor, a British computer programmer who had come from Thailand. Learned the system language and much more. Returned to Canada (Vancouver) in 1994. Found the Vancouver Freenet and the Linux community. Installed Debian by hand coding from C: on a cobbled together 386 around 1995. Played in DOS a lot, installed a lot of great software found on the internet, including Mini Menu, a little Windows-like program that used icons in a grid array like Windows 10. It was designed by a Scandinavian couple for kids. Great fun! Next association with Linux was in 2009, when I bought a Dell netbook 910 with Ubuntu 8.04 installed. Worked not so great, so decided to upgrade to 9 (and also joined Ubuntu) - but was disappointed in the new `look`. But it worked well for some while, until the modem died, so I put the netbook away. Around the end of May 2019, I purchased my third desktop Acer Aspire with Win10, and decided to remove the hard drive, put in a new one, and install the latest Ubuntu. Install worked from USB, but would not boot to flash drive grub afterwards so I could partition the hard drive. So On June 2, 2019, I extracted my old netbook from storage and installed Lubuntu using a bootable flash drive created in Ubuntu Bionic. Took two hours, but it worked and takes up only 1/4 of the 16GB SSD. Pleased with that, although modem still doesn`t work - apparently a known problem with this model. Plan to use it to write away from this office. So to the present. I have Win 8 installed on my previous Acer Aspire (itself the second Acer desktop I`ve had), and no problems. The new one is not yet functioning properly with Ubuntu Bionic because the flash drive still would not boot to the grub. I was frustrated, and have a lot less patience than 24 years ago. On June 6, in desperation, I reformatted my hard drive and installed 19.04 from a flash drive. It went well. Flash drive still wouldn`t boot unless I deactivated the hard drive, but doing that gave me the grub BASH terminal window, which was unhelpful. So on June 7, I got a brainstorm and created a live boot dvd on a Win8 machine using the 19.04 iso. Took several minutes to create it. Then I put it into the Ubuntu machine and changed the bios, which was now registering a UEFI device, so I made that the first boot option. The boot worked, but the live Ubuntu took a very long time to load, so a lot of patience was needed. But once the live session was loaded, I was able to use gparted to partition the hard drive. No problems. Did a reboot, removed the dvd and checked the bios, which showed Ubuntu booting first. When Ubuntu booted, I checked the partitions with Disks and they are all showing accurately. Progress! Now have to see if I can write to a dvd, which I couldn`t in 18.04. Profile ©