Trouble Installing Distro(s) on old laptop.

[kalpana]

Hi everyone!

So I'm currently on a long vacation. I work remotely and independently. The other day my machine got stolen. I'm quite remote at the moment so a friend gave me his old MacBook (the last 17 inch MacBook Pro).

It's really old and slow so I decided to install Linux onto it but have run into consecutive problems. Its an old MacBook so I used a command line tool called Diskutils to burn the ISO onto a USB.

For Lubuntu and Linux Mint:
The ISO successfully burned onto the USB but when I boot the machine up there is no option to boot from USB.

For Elementary OS:
The machine can successfully read the USB as bootable but when I continue with the installation I get a black screen. I recognize that many people have this problem with elementary but I've tried the solutions (editing grub file) to no avail.

I'm at my witts end, I've spent the last day and a half doing this. I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right place. But can anyone assist me on either point?