I was given an elderly Macbook (32 bit) and decided to install Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon. This worked, but was slow, and I decided to try a live CD of Puppy Xenial 7.5.

The opening screen showed the following message:
1.
2.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type : _

The cursor was flashing, but the keyboard and trackpad were unresponsive, and when I plugged in an Apple keyboard and mouse, those too were dead.

I shut down the computer and tried again without result, and was extremely relieved to find (thank you, internet) that holding down the Option key at start-up allowed me to choose to boot Linux Mint from the hard-drive, and then to remove the CD.

However the suggestions I found here:
https://medium.com/@mark.stanislav/f...c-76bde5d6a593

to persuade the computer to boot from the CD were unproductive: although holding down the "1" key continuously resulted in the opening screen appearing with a "1" already entered, nothing else happened. Holding down "1" and "Enter" gave no result at all.

Note that the Macbook does not seem to recognize live USB keys.

Is there a way past this bottleneck?

You'll need to investigate how your Macbook loads its O/S, they used to use a completely different way to that on Intel/AMD machines, which is how the Linux live boot CDs work. How did you install Mint?

Excellent question—Linux Mint was installed from a DVD, and it hadn't occurred to me to try running that again to see what would happen.

I just tried it again, and it loaded without difficulty (very slowly, but it was that way the first time).

I then tried with a different Puppy disk, for Slacko 6.30, and it booted up without difficulty.
I did the same thing with a live CD of Tahr 6.0.2 with the same result.


Out of curiosity I tried the Xenial CD in a Thinkpad, and it booted up happily, so I guess it just doesn't like the Macbook.

I'll leave this open for a day or two in case there is a suggestion for a way to give the Xenial CD the necessary nudge to make it boot (I like Xenial) but if necessary I will go with SLacko.

Thank you again!

I bit the bullet and reformatted the hard-drive with GParted, and thereafter the installation went well.