Installing Centos 6.5 on IBM ThinkPad with Win XP.
Cold boot
CDROM spins up
Centos 6 screen appears but no menu
nothing more.

the 6.5 dvd will likely fail
6.5 is UNSUPPORTED

the software moved to the historical archive "The Vault"

please use the CURRENT ( in the older 6 series ) 6.6
or
install the CURRENT version of CentOS
CentOS 7.1


now as to the hardware
what is in this old thinkpad and HOW OLD is it ?
if it is one of the celeron laptops from 2002 or 5
http://www.cnet.com/products/ibm-thi...-13-ghz/specs/
you might have to use the LEGACY hardware older 5 series
CentOS 5.11


or is it one of the win2000 pentium3 jobs
http://www.cnet.com/products/ibm-thi...b-30-gb/specs/
you are looking at "Damn Small Linux"

Thanks for your reply, John.

I've started the Linux course and they suggest having a system operating. So, my old IBM has Win XP and is therefore idle and available for experiment. The CPU is a 600 mHz Pentium M that should be adequate.

I tinkered with the boot routine and got the Centos menu up but it complains about the inappropriate kernel. Your comments will keep me from charging up a blind alley and I thank you for that especially.

My other machines are Win 8 and I hesitate to go to a dual boot. I did that back in the early days of MS Windows and had some problems. Just recently I loaded a prelim version of MS Win 10 as a dual boot and it cost me one of my favorite time-killer games that I cannot replace.

Anyway, I'm on my way to a version 7 now.

Thanks for taking the time and trouble to help out.

Kenny

how much RAM ?
cent 6 really likes a gig of ram, or more , but will run ? ok ? with 512 meg
if this laptop has 128 to 256 meg ram
you will have a problem


CentOS 5 ran fast ( many years ago ) on a desktop with 512 meg ram and a early pentium4

To clarify: the above should be read as two separate statements because booting up the installer may fail for basic resource reasons and not due to the release being unsupported. If that was not what the above message intended to convey then I'll mark that as deliberate misleading information, which would be very bad indeed.

The RAM is 768 Meg. I presume that is sufficient for ver. 7.1

There's ample documentation so there's no valid reason to "presume" anything.

My newbie error. Please forgive.

"Pentium M" is a 32-bit processor family. The standard CentOS 7 release is 64-bit only. There has been some work on a 32-bit version, but you won't find it yet on the regular download sites. It's strictly a volunteer effort. Red Hat does not provide a 32-bit version of RHEL 7.

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Thx, RK. Very helpful. I'm going over to Ubuntu for now.

Does that processor support PAE? If not, you'll find that very few modern distros will work. I believe Debian (at least 5, maybe one of the newer ones) can run a non-PAE 32-bit kernel, probably a few others.

Thx ER, that's a really good question. Checking Wikipedia I find:

"The Banias family processors internally support PAE but do not show the PAE support flag in their CPUID information; this causes some operating systems (primarily Linux distributions) to refuse to boot on such processors since PAE support is required in their kernels."

I guess that shoots down my venerable IBM Thinkpad.