I screwed up my first few installs of Ubuntu until I learned what
*not* to do. Stay with it and you'll get there too, and there's always
lots of help when you do have problems

Regarding getting on-line if Ubuntu does mess up and you don't have
another system handy, it's a whole lot quicker if you have a bootable
USB Flash drive rather than the CD, and Ubuntu will obligingly create
one very easily through 'Startup Disc Creator'.

Using 11.10, click on the 'Dash' icon and type Startup Disc Creator
into the search box. 10.04 and lower, click on [ System /
Administration ] to get to this.

BM> Don't know what I'm doing wrong.