@kilgoretrout and all the others who try to help me.

Let me please first tell you why you are doing something very good for poor people by your efforts:

I am working for a German elementary school with 441 school kids, more of 80 percent of them with "migration background" (Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian, Arabian, ...). Many of them are too poor to buy a laptop or PC of their own. So we plan to ask the "richer" parents and all our other contacts to donate us their old, unused laptops and PCs (mostly machines on which once ran Windows XP, but which are too slow now for MS-products or too filled with garbage now so that the owner thinks she/he has to throw it away and buy the latest bleeding-edge laptop with Windows 9), and apart
from that, I do not want to teach school kids that they are dependent on a certain company for their whole lifetime) and install some Linux distro on it.

I am first in the testing phase of this project, and the ThinkPad T60p that we talk about here is one of these machines already donated. Windows XP was installed, but the screen constantly froze and the owner bought himself a new laptop.

I have started to experiment with Lubuntu because the GUI is similar to what children know from MS-products and because it is designed for running on old hardware. And, if possible, I would even like to install Edubuntu because it has so many good education software, but I do not know yet whether it is too resource consuming for old hardware.

The final challenge for me will be: How do I install, fighting alone, Linux on 441 laptops all of a different manufacturer and all differing in model without spending too much time of my own? (I plan to start a new thread for that as soon as we know what distro we will use and what software should be pre-installed.)

Now on to kllgoretrout's proposal:

I have successfully installed debian-live-8.1.0-i386-lxde-desktop.iso. The installer said that everything was OK, and I should restart the machine (of course after plugging out the USB stick).

When I then reboot, I get a last plain text screen with

So the same message as with Salix as proposed by TobiSGD.

This is actually pretty easy, I have done mass deployment of Ubuntu based systems before and can help you with that. But as you said, let us speak about that in a different thread.

This is normal with Debian, since it comes by default without proprietary firmware, but the firmware can be installed from the non-free repositories. The firmware is not needed to boot the system.
This is not an error message, but an indicator that the CPU is capable of hardware virtualization and that that function is disabled in the BIOS. You can try to enable it there and see if that helps, but I doubt it. I would guess that the initialization hangs in the part that comes after that KVM detection, but I wouldn't know which part that is.

Quick question - Are you getting to a login prompt after the "kvm: disabled by bios"? It would be on the next line and look something like:

If not, you could try passing some kernel boot parameters. For the debian installation, hit the "e" key as soon as you see the grub boot selection screen. Use the arrow keys to go down to the line that says "linux". Use your right arrow key to go to the end of that line; it usually ends with the word "quiet". Leave a space between quiet and your edits and type:

at the end of that line. Then hit the F10 key which will boot the system with your added kernel boot parameters.

That would open you the doors to paradise on doomsday! You cannot know how many children you would make happy!

I have just enabled it, but the machine hangs with the same "kvm:..." line. I have tried to update the BIOS from the machine's currrent version 2.25 to the newest 2.27, even though I think that would not help much. Well, I did not manage to update the BIOS. I spent the last 12 hours with this problem. If you want to read the funny story, look at my postings as "ziegler-g" on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p....php?t=2281561

At least I got Hiren's Boot CD running on the T60p, but when I start the "Mini Windows XP" (how can this be legal???), the Windows XP desktop appears, and after a few seconds, the screen freezes... Let us smile :-)

No. The "kvm..." is the last line that appears.

WOW WOW WOW!

The graphical login screen appears, I can login, the whole desktop appears nicely, the time on the clock in the lower right corner is correct etc., but... the mouse pointer stands still in the middle of the screen, and after a few seconds, also the keyboard keys do not work any more, e.g. CTRl+ALT+F1, ALT+TAB. Some seconds before that, I could select with TAB in a dialogue whether I wanted to save the "history" (whatever this is), and I selected "No" and acknowledged with ENTER. But that was already the end of the party.

But I think, we are one step further. But why does it freeze, also under XP?

What confuses me, is that I saw in the grub boot selection screen, that a vmlinuz-pae kernel is used. I thought I had installed (as proposed by someone of you above) a non-pae kernel. I know what PAE is, but now I am confused between what a pae-kernel and a non-pae-kernel is, and how I can decide which one I have to use, and how I can detect whether my processor has or has not PAE and whether it should be enabled and not.

I'm not sure, but one easy/quick thing to try is removng the battery and running on just the power supply with the battery removed. I saw one post where that fixed a freezing issue on T60:

http://www.thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=97691

Will try to get to your other questions later. Kind of rushed right now.

There may be a mouse key on 1 of the F-keys, to be used in conjunction with Fn.

+1 on the Battery pull suggestion. I have seen bad batteries do strange things on my wifes friends Windows laptops when dropped off for me to fix as a girlfriend favor.

Usually I've found that after enough time, any hardware will fail, but usually it starts with the SouthBridge, and specifically the Ethernet/Network controller.

A good way to test viability of any system using Linux is to disable udev and start the system. Because udev loads many drivers at once, often this can mask the problem. The best solution is to take note of the drivers used by your system, and then manually load them one by one and test the system. If kmod hangs the system on a certain driver, then usually that'll be the answer as to which part is going kaput.

Otherwise, if your system uses a POST Beep system, the beeps will tell you right away what is wrong.

Mentioned earlier, the SouthBridge going out can get fairly bad quickly. This hub controls networking, pci/isa functions, disk drive I/O, and several other functions like audio and modems. Once this goes, things get obvious there's something wrong. The NorthBridge can be less obvious but equally bad as it controls the rest of the system, especially the CPU, RAM, PCIE/AGP, and USB systems. failures here often are faster but worse on the system.

Truth be told, if the system or any non-replaceable part is going out, just replace the whole system, and don't waste your time trying to pin it down, especially if it's a laptop.

@kilgoretrout and @rokytenji:

The hint with unplugging the battery does not work

@EDDY1:

I have pressed Fn with all combinations from F1 to F12. Nothing happens. What exactly do you mean by "mouse key"? Maybe I should try an external mouse and an external keyboard. BTW, the mouse pointer already stands still at the login screen, but i do not need it there to enter my user name and password.

@ReaperX7:

Since they introduced udev 10 years ago, I wonder what exactly it is. I will first have to read about it. Seems I am learning more here than my children :-) How do I disable it and how do I enable the drivers one by one? This ThinkPad T60p does not do any "beep" at all while booting.

@all:

How do I set the kernel parameters "noapic nolapic acpi=off" during the installationso that I do not have to enter them over and over again with every reboot?

Thank you. If enough of you tell me "Throw away this machine", I will do it :-( But as said, I am stubborn...

comes to mind since grub2 is the default bootloader for most distros.

http://de.mcbf.net/david/grubchoosedefault/

Though I am probably missing the mark since all changes are done /etc/default/grub and then a is needed for changes made in /etc/default/grub to take on next boot.

Easy way out? Download. Md5sum check. This. Burn to a cd at slow 4x or below speed.

edit: oops, forgot to point my finger

Watch this video before bootup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kCotJWcoiE

Pay attention to the F keys and check out the long box you can type boot cheat codes in on the lower part of your screen during a live bootup.

Meh, I sold my IBM A22M with AntiX on it as a wirless laptop to a kid
that wanted social cred in his peer group as a geek. I was his
sensei sorta kinda for that. I am a stubborn cuss also when it comes to
fixing older gear.

So if you wanna feel good about yourself. Be stubborn and keep helping those kids you mentioned. Street cred for us older farts are harder to come by these days.

What is the model of your thinkpad

ThinkPad T60p

Yes, but I do not come to these steps! The screen freezes after the login procedure. So there should/must be a way to set the parameters while installing from a Live USB Stick. Is there one? I have not discovered one, though I have tried many distributions now.

Thank you for your effort and your encouraging words!

Hi...

If you have time before it freezes, open a terminal and post the output from...

Perhaps that might give a clue as to what's going on.

Regards