Installing SerenityOS on My Old ThinkPad T60
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Installing SerenityOS on My Old ThinkPad T60
2026-06-28
I recently had the urge to play around with SerenityOS on real hardware. Since the project is slightly catered towards older machines, I figured my ThinkPad T60 was a perfect candidate for running on bare metal.
The following is a loose guide for those interested in doing the same. Take note that I built SerenityOS on a separate device running Fedora , so the instructions below are based on that.
Initial Setup
First we need to grab all the packages required to run and build of SerenityOS image:
sudo dnf install texinfo binutils-devel curl cmake mpfr-devel libmpc-devel gmp-devel e2fsprogs ninja-build patch ccache rsync @development-tools @c-development @virtualization
Now we clone the project:
git clone https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity.git<br>cd serenity
Next we build the cross-toolchain:
Meta/serenity.sh image x86_64
Then we can create our bootable image (soon to be flashed to our SSD):
cd Build/x86_64 && ninja grub-image
Now plug in your SSD of choice, find it’s destination and flash this created image to it:
sudo dd if=grub_disk_image of=/dev/sdX bs=64M status=progress && sync
Insert the recently flashed SSD into the laptop and that should be it!
BIOS Settings
Also be sure to set your default Serial ATA (SATA) settings in your BIOS to “Compatibility” and not AHCI. That tripped me up at first…
Our First Boot
Things never run perfectly the first time, do they? I booted up the T60 and was greeted with the following:
StorageManagement: Detected 1 storage devices<br>Device: block3:0 (ata, 1 partitions)<br>Partition: 1, block100:0 (UUID {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000})<br>KERNEL PANIC! :^(<br>StorageManagement: Couldn't find a suitable device to boot
Uh oh…
I had to do some internet sleuthing to figure out what the heck was happening here. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I need to tweak the details found in the project’s Meta/grub-mbr.cfg file.
So this:
menuentry 'SerenityOS (normal)' {<br>root=hd0,1<br>multiboot /boot/Kernel root="lun0:0:0;part0"
need to be changed to:
menuentry 'SerenityOS (normal)' {<br>root=hd0,1<br>multiboot /boot/Kernel root="block100:0"
Then I needed to rebuild and reflash to the T60:
rm Build/x86_64/grub_disk_image<br>cd Build/x86_64<br>ninja grub-image
Booting Again…
It’s alive! We got a successful boot!
SerenityOS running on my T60. Isn't it beautiful?
Things are pretty straight forward once you understand the whole process. Hopefully this inspires you to give SerenityOS a test run as well!
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