Installing Ubuntu Mate on a older version Gateway computer

Question

I am trying to install Ubuntu Mate on an older model Gateway computer using a USB drive and getting a blank black screen and it is not recognizing the ISO.

Answer 1

From my experience on old Gateway computers from the Windows 98 and Windows 2000 era (and sometimes even the XP era), these computers often require a CD or DVD to install instead of a USB.

I believe the reason is that, at the time these computers were made, the typical storage capability of USB devices was very low and it would require multiple USB drives to equal one installation. Although this was common for those floppy zip drives, it was much easier to store a series of tiny floppy zip drives on a book shelf, for example, than it would be to have a bunch of USB thumb drives.

From Windows, you'd need to right click on the iso file and select "burn disk image" assuming you already have a blank DVD-R disk in the DVD tray of the DVD-R burner of your computer.

From Ubuntu (again, assuming you already have a blank disk in the tray), first install Brasero:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install brasero

Then, open the Brasero application.

For "select a disk image to write" select your iso file.

For "select a disk to write to" select your blank DVD-R disk.

It should report success when finished burning.

FYI, the last time I tried to install the default version of Ubuntu 22.04 on a legacy BIOS system, I had to do some editing before it would work. Therefore if you encounter issues installing Mate, I would then recommend installing 20.04 first, and then you can possibly manually update to newer versions after installation. Since Mate is designed for lower resource computers, you may not encounter any problems.

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After installation, if you find that the MATE desktop is too resource heavy for your old computer, I would recommend a desktop environment that was designed for older computers.

So from your newly installed Ubuntu system, open a terminal by pressing CTRL+ALT+t and then install the IceWM desktop:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install icewm icewm-common

After installation, log out your user and then select the icewm desktop typically by clicking on the icon next to where you put in your password on the login screen and then selecting IceWM instead of MATE.