Need help installing TSmini on netbook from usb

Do you have another computer with a CD drive? I think it would be easiest to run the Trisquel live CD and make a USB startup disk from that.

What operating system are you currently running?

I am considering your machine doesn't has a disc drive.
You can use FUSBi or UNetbootin
They both are the same but FUSBi recommends only free distributions like trisquel

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 an 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 ISO 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. Before you write to the stick using dd, you should unmount it (again) via

$ umount my_usb

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…