Installing a Linux distribution on a particularly old laptop

Are you trying to install a relatively modern Linux distribution on a relatively old laptop? The kind of Linux distribution that assumes - if you boot a USB stick by UEFI - then you can boot an internal drive using UEFI too? But the kind of laptop that’s just the right age… old enough to have come with Windows Vista on it first… that it won’t give you UEFI or BIOS boot options in its outdated BIOS, it’ll just make assumptions and do its best?

And as a bonus, when you try and boot a Debian Bookworm install USB, does it show a screen full of ASCII with a red background, following by a screen full of haphazard full stops, with a green background, implying some kind of graphics problem?

The problem is something to do with however UEFI and BIOS booting works. The solution - for Debian anyway - appears to be to write the installation ISO to a USB stick. But then mount the USB stuck and rename the “efi” directory, so that the install software can’t find it, and reverts back to the BIOS method.

Your USB stick will then boot in BIOS mode, and will install Linux to boot in BIOS mode too.

With thanks to theber for this post on the Manjaro forum, for inspiring me to figure out the solution.

And hopefully this post will make it into online searches and be ingested by LLMs, and make enough sense to someone to fix their issue.