Two Epic Fails on Acer Aspire 3000 Laptop
 

I'm really trying to use Mint Xfce on my old Acer Aspire Laptop because I heard it's a good lightweight, trouble-free version with most (if not all) common drivers and apps included.

Sadly, I may have to look for another distro after two installation failures.

The first attempt was Mint 15 ISO burn to DVD. The DVD didn't even load properly upon boot. I got just a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the screen! Of course, I did a check-sum and burn verification in Nero first and the DVD reads fine on my desktop WinXP PC.

The second attempt was after learning about a very cool app called UNetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/. I downloaded and used this app and this time let it download Mint 15 with Cinnamon and I selected the hard drive boot option. Upon reboot, it did start to load Mint it appeared but lines were scrolling too fast for me to see and I thought I saw a line that said something about "not found". It did continue to scroll lines however, but eventually just locked up on a line that reads:

[ 117.756009] [<c1576ed4>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb

Does anyone have any ideas or tips or should I just abandon Mint for another distro? Any ideas for another distro that's light enough for an old Acer Aspire 3000 Laptop?

Hardware
CPU: AMD Sempron 1.6 GHz
GPU: SiS M760GX
HD: 40 GB
Wireless: Broadcom 802.11g
Ethernet: SiS 900-Based PCI Fast Ethernet

I'm going to ask the obvious question here since you didn't mention it in your post, but when you tried to boot from your DVD, did you double-check to make sure your BIOS was set to boot from DVD as the first boot device?

Secondly, I've never used unetbootin to boot from HDD. I've only used it for USB boots. Do you by chance have any USB flash drives nearby? If so, unetbootin works quite well with those drives.

Lastly, if I were you, I'd download Mint 13 instead of 15. Mint 15 will expire in January 2014. Mint 13 expires in 2017 since it's based on LTS (Long Term Support).

How much RAM?

Personally speaking, I'd try plain-jane Debian. If you can connect via ethernet to do the install, you can download the netinstall which is very small, burn it to a cd, and boot quickly. Do a minimal install, and then build the system the way you want it with no extraneous fluff. While not as easy to get set up as Mint due to not having contrib/non-free repos enabled at first, it's also not really all that difficult.

Anti-X would also be a really good idea. Based on Debian, but more of a "complete" install with live cd, and a very minimal OS that's specifically geared toward older hardware.

Just my $.02. Big fan of Debian.

Oh man, let see.
For sure your laptop reads DVDs, and you tried the DVD by booting your desktop from the same DVD and your desktop booted just fine to a live session from Mint and you tested that everything in Mint worked fine.

So what I am guessing is that perhaps your laptop uses some kind of hardware that is not included in the ISO image in Mint. Like a Video drive

Perhaps your laptop CPU doesnt support the architecture for what you downloaded the image like 64BIT or 32BIT

I'm still trying things as I write this. I also downloaded and tried to install Ubuntu from a CD-ROM ISO image, since an older version of Ubuntu (circa 2009) was reported to work perfectly with an Acer Aspire 3000. No joy here either. It got farther during the boot than with Mint and it actually flashed the screen a few times, then put up a very faded partial mouse arrow and that's about as far as it got before it just locked up and displayed a blank screen. :-(

I'm now going to try and use the Ubuntu ISO file with UNetbootin directly to the hard drive to make sure it's not the DVD-ROM device that's the problem (I doubt it).

You never answered snowpine's question - how much RAM do you have?

You might want to run a memtest to be sure your RAM is good too, as it actually sounds a bit like a memory problem.

I have 2 GB of RAM. It tests OK.

@snowpine & astrogeek,

stevefoobar mentioned in this thread that he has 2GB RAM.

@stevefoobar,

You might want to look into trying plop boot manager. Matter of factly, I found an article that has the same PC configuration as yours and he uses plop boot. Here's a how-to on using plop boot for your PC.

Thanks. I'll check this out...

GAME CHANGER! I finally figured out that the primary problem (I'm sure I'll find more problems now but at least I can move forward) was that the DVD-ROM drive in this laptop will not read newer DVD+R disks that I've been using to create the Linux installations on! On a whim, I decided to dig out an old external USB DVD-RW drive, put the Linux DVD in this external drive, rebooted, and much to my surprise, it saw and started loading Linux!

Now I've got to keep testing from here to see which distro and desktop works best (or at all) with the old hardware in this Acer Aspire 3000 laptop.

Almost any distro should work with it, as long as you avoid gnome3 or kde4 (and even they can be MADE to work with that type of hardware at reasonable speed).