As others have already suggested, you should create a live USB stick and boot
from that. It will present you an almost full-featured Trisquel and won't
change your existing install at all so you can safely experiment with it. If
you feel somewhat familiar with it, click the “Install Trisquel” icon on
the desktop to install. If you are unsure, always accept the defaults that
the installer suggests; you shouldn't do too much wrong that way. It won't
ask you too many questions, anyway.
To boot from the stick, I had to go to the BIOS settings of my computer and
push the boot order of an entry named “USB-HDD” above that of the
internal hard disk. After I did that, the system would boot fine from a USB
stick but I had to make sure that no external USB drives without a bootable
partition were plugged during boot or the BIOS won't find and operating
system.
I have also found out that the quality of the USB stick you use matters. If
it is very slow, you won't have much fun with the live system. (It might
even refuse to work at all.) Using a € 10,— stick with 8 GB and a
specified transfer speed of 18 MB/s on read and 5 MB/s on write worked very
well.
Creating a Live USB Stick on POSIX Systems
If you are currently running any kind of POSIX operating system (any
GNU/Linux distribution, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc.) you can create a live USB
stick simply by downloading the IOS image and then copy it to a USB stick via
$ sudo dd if=trisquel_5.5_amd64.iso of=/dev/sdx
$ sync
where you replace sdx with the device name of the USB stick you want to use.
Be very sure to use the correct letter here, or whatever other disk you are
erroneously referring to will be seriously damaged. If your stick has a
label, say my_usb, you can find out the correct letter via running
$ mount | grep my_usb
Note that this will output you a partition name like /dev/sdb1. In this
example, /dev/sdb would be the device itself that you would reference in the
dd command.
Creating a Live USB Stick on MS Windows
I never did this myself but when I sent my father this link, he was able to
create himself a live USB stick for Ubuntu without complaining about any
difficulties.
Unfortunately, I can't find a hint on that website to create a Trisquel
stick. If you can't find that option either, and you have two USB sticks
available and your netbook has two free USB ports, you may consider creating
the Trisquel stick from within Ubuntu as described above.
A completely different option is, of course, to ask a friend who is already
running GNU/Linux to make the stick for you…
