running bionic beaver from USB stick sometimes crashes requiring I pull the stick before rebooting.

[Mike Marchywka]

I recentrly downloaded this version,  ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso ,
and got it to run on old e-machines with Sempron 3100 and about 750M RAM 
using  version 5.10 of syslinux ( the startup creator on my other Ubuntu install did not seem to work well
so I did everything by hand, I needed to keep hacking the assembly code to find the geometry checks
etc lol  ). It runs great in single user mode and update/upgrade seemed to
go ok. Early during the process of making the stick and then again when trying to run 
lightdm ( and the sources.list did not include universe which was a surprise but I never checked release notes) 
the thing froze and would not reboot until I removed the USB stick,  

Pulling the stick, booting Debian from the HD and then rebooting with stick in place and selecting
it for boot does appear to work. The USB, HD, and BIOS all appear to be intact. 

Where should I be looking for the problem?

I was also curious what this thing is supposed to do for a swap partition. 

I did set up casper and home rw and
sn but the sn thing just gives errors at boot and shutdown.  

What is the lightest thing I can run that will support firefox as I am obviously resource
limited? 

I also seem to have some problem with dhclient and restarting networking, 
I have to run it manually a few times although I also got rid of the linked
version of /etc/resolv..conf and just put in 8.8.8.8 for a nameserver. 

Thanks.



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 Mike Marchywka 306 Charles Cox Drive Canton, GA 30115
 2295 Collinworth  Drive Marietta GA 30062.  formerly 487 Salem Woods Drive Marietta GA 30067 404-788-1216 (C)<- leave message 989-348-4796 (P)<- emergency