I discovered that ubuntuMATE 15.04 installs without intervention on my HP touch, And it worked really well, but now I'm having some problems with it. It is not a dual boot system, but I would like to get to the grub menu, to be able to but in a different mode to do some trouble shooting. But it won't show me the Grub meñu.

I have tried holding down the shift key wile booting. No Good. I've tried editing the /etc/default/grub file, But don't really know which lines to comment out, or if a line needs to be changed or added.

And it is pretty hard to get it to do anything, because more than half the time it won't recognize any mouse clicks, and at time won't let me type any text in terminal or gui.

Help seems to be available for "ubuntu -anything" except 15.04.

According to the Grub manual, if holding SHIFT does not work, try tapping ESC instead. That does not work for me. I have mine set for one second, and I make it pause by tapping the UP or DOWN arrow key as it is loading.
Make sure that GRUB_TIMEOUT=5. Then you have to place a # in front of the line that says GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 - so that it looks like this
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
In order for that change to take effect, you have to run If you do that, and it still does not work, post the contents of /etc/default/grub here so we can see if there is an error.

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The problem with the mouse-click not working, and with it refusing to let me type consistently led me to just give up and re-install - this time with xubuntu 15.10, and then alongside (dual boot) with ubuntuMATE 15.10, so I think I'm ok with it now. Thanks for the reply. I did get into th grub menu by using escape - although I had to reboot more than once to do it because, althou8gh it would tell me to use f9 to choose a but menu, it would then not respond at all to f9. So there my be a deeper problem (maybe memory?). but time will tell. For now with this (not showing the grub menu), I'm going to mark it solved.

I installed grub-customizer which allowed me to give it a longer timeout, among other things.
http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/...r-ubuntu-1404/
Why mess with command line if you don't have to...

Ah... I see. That sucks.

It has served my basic needs for kernel selection (Backup Plan in case something goes wrong rolling my own kernel.. as in it's imperative to have a grub menu for that operation). All I did was give it a two second timeout and default kernel selection.
I come from LILO, so I really (didn't) want to become familiar with grub on a personal level (although grub has some nice features now, like USB booting, etc.).