I’m afraid it’s been awhile since I used Ubuntu, so I can’t help you.
If worse comes to worse and it installs on SSD, so what? What you have now doesn’t work and you’ve already done one reinstall of ROCK.
Maybe @Martin_Webster can chime in?
BTW - My guess is Ubuntu won’t stay connected either.
The Ubuntu installed is the equivalent of a live CD so it won’t install over ROCK unless you explicitly tell it to.
Happy to walk you through the steps. What OS would you use to create the pen drive image?
I’d appreciate being walked through the steps Martin. I used Window 10 to put the Unbuntu iso file onto a 16GB USB flash drive. The booted from the flash drive on the NUC.
Okay, it sounds like you’ve already made good progress. Does the NUC successfully boot the flash drive?
Yes. As I said in an earlier post…
Have managed to boot up with Ubuntu, but I know not what I’m doing.
It’s asking if I want to do a recovery. Is Ubuntu supposed to just run from the USB stick, or is is it going to want to install onto the SSD drive of the NUC thus destroying the Roon setup that’s there?
Can you get on the Internet using Firefox on Ubuntu?
Just wanted to be sure you were at the Ubuntu desktop. It will run directly from the pen drive without installing anything on the SSD.
You don’t want to select Recovery (you’re getting that option because Linux was detected.) There should be an option to Try Ubuntu.
Once you’re at the desktop open Terminal (click the icon in the bottom left corner and scroll down to find the app) then type the following.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install net-tools
Then run ifconfig to confirm the ROCK’s IP address. There will be lots of output, so look for the section after lo: as this will list the devices IP address.
Next run nmap for your network, e.g. nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24. This will list all connected devices on the subnet. You can also see what ports are open for each device: nmap --top-ports 10 192.168.1.1.
I’m not seeing an option to try/run Ubuntu from the flash drive. I can either select the SSD drive and choose to recover, or I can quit.
Hey @Lloyd_Borrett – myself and a lot of the team has been heads down over the last few weeks getting our next release ready, but I just wanted to let you know that @noris has been giving us updates about your issue, and we’re all looking forward to getting this stable for you at long last.
My gut is that this is some kind of hardware problem, which are generally the trickiest kinds of issues to debug, because things don’t always fail in consistent ways. This makes methodical troubleshooting impractical, expensive, or at worst, impossible. Swapping RAM, HD, NUC, etc is a huge pain, so hopefully it doesn’t come to that 
Really frustrating stuff.
For the moment, I don’t have much more to add, but I saw that this thread was still going and I just wanted to reassure you that you’re in good hands with Noris, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to get this resolved.
Big thank you to @xxx, @AMP, @Geoff_Coupe, @Martin_Webster, and everyone else who’s commented for all your help here as well.
And again, cheers to @Lloyd_Borrett for not smashing that thing into a million tiny pieces. We’ll nail this yet! 
Thanks Mike. I’ll look forward to the new release.
I suspect you’re right, which is why I have another 16GB memory coming to swap in. If it’s not that then I’ll just have heaps of memory.
With ROCK running as a headless device, even if I hook up a screen, I still can’t tell if I’m just loosing the network connection, or if the Intel NUC has stopped. Would be nice if there was some test/diagnostics mode that could be enabled on the setup to help with this.
Others have suggested running Ubuntu, but I haven’t been able to get it running from a 16GB flash drive. Might be nice to have a procedure documented in the knowledge base on how to get something running from a flash drive so that NUC diagnostics could be run. Would think it could help you with supporting the Nucleus as well.
Norris has been great, and I truly appreciate it.
Everyone has been great. Shame I’m not up-to-speed enough on things like Ubuntu and Linux to try more things.
Believe me, I’ve come close. But I want my music back! Problem is I’m not at the dive shop every day, and it’s hard to find time to try stuff. I know this is supposed to be a quiet time of the year in the dive industry down under, but the only thing quiet here is the shop music system.
Our clocks aren’t synced! 
I’m guessing you’re seeing the boot screen … I don’t recall seeing these options–I will try later to confirm–so think you may be seeing the ROCK boot menu. It may be that the NUC isn’t seeing the flash drive, so you may need to enable this in the BIOS.
With the Ubuntu flash drive, once selected, it will boot directly to the desktop.
I’m using the F10 key to select boot from the flash drive. it boots from the flash drive with Ubuntu screens and a Ubuntu Recovery program. I get to select if I want to recover with the only drive option being the NUC SSD.
If I choose not to do that it then boots up ROCK.
Let me download Ubuntu and see what the deal is. You should be able to run from thumb drive.
Just tried this on my Mac … the options I see are:
If you do nothing, option 1 is selected and it will boot to the desktop. Recovery mode shouldn’t be available … wait a minute, maybe the wrong image … check that it’s this one for your architecture:
I used the link to a download of Ubuntu for an Intel NUC earlier in this topic. It doesn’t give me all of those options. I think it was the desktop version download option, not the core.
Maybe I need to try the core version.
Try the standard desktop ISO: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you?version=18.04.1&architecture=amd64.
Off to bed now.
Yeah, I just downloaded the DeskTop ISO. That’s the one you want.
You don’t want core. Just take the simplest option there is and that is the DeskTop version.
You should be good to go.
So I think I downloaded and have been trying…
Install Ubuntu Desktop on the Intel® NUC
https://www.ubuntu.com/download/iot/intel-nuc-desktop
So should I go for…
Install Ubuntu Core on the Intel® NUC
https://www.ubuntu.com/download/iot/intel-nuc
The installation instructions refer to having two flash drives, one with Core and one with Desktop.
or the one you’ve pointed me to…
Download Ubuntu Desktop
https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop
So many choices, and they are big downloads, so I want to get it right.
Ubuntu.com->Download->Ubuntu Desktop or you can click on this link - https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop. You don’t want core or server or anything for NUC. You just want DeskTop.
Download it and then use Rufus or Etcher to put it on your thumb drive.
F10 to boot into it, select “Try Ubuntu”, and you’re good to go.
@Lloyd_Borrett - I just noticed Roon has a new release. Maybe you should try that before anything else.
Maybe, we’ll luck out.
More news. The 250 Gb internal second SSD drive and extra 16 Gb of RAM for the NUC arrived.
I put the SSD drive in. I took out the existing 16 Gb RAM chip and put the new one in (testing for bad RAM chip). ROCK came up. Formatted the new SSD drive successfully from the ROCK web interface. System dropped offline after a few minutes.
Put the old 16 Gb RAM chip back in, so now there’s 32 Gb of RAM. System dropped offline after a few minutes.
So back to trying to get Ubuntu running to see what we can learn.