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
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
  Device: block3:0 (ata, 1 partitions)
    Partition: 1, block100:0 (UUID {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000})
KERNEL PANIC! :^(
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)' {
 root=hd0,1
 multiboot /boot/Kernel root="lun0:0:0;part0"
}

need to be changed to:

menuentry 'SerenityOS (normal)' {
 root=hd0,1
 multiboot /boot/Kernel root="block100:0"
}

Then I needed to rebuild and reflash to the T60:

rm Build/x86_64/grub_disk_image
cd Build/x86_64
ninja grub-image

Booting Again…

It’s alive! We got a successful boot!

Things are pretty straight forward once you understand the whole process. Hopefully this inspires you to give SerenityOS a test run as well!