USB Boot of rEFInd & Linux on 64bit 2007 Macbook w/32bit EFI

[rusolone]

Old Macbook of type described. mid 2007 A1181 Intel 2,18 4gb RAM 64bit w/32bit EFI
Bought & intslaled New SSD. Internal Optical Drive doesn't work.
External Optical Drive will only boot original10.4 Tiger disk (I don't have). Trying to boot OEM Snow Leopard results in Grey Prohibited Circle'
At the least, I want to install Fedora (21 or higher), but at this point any Linux version is OK (Ubuntu next choice). Maybe dual-boot, but first need to get 1 OS installed
Only option? =>USB Boot of 32 bit Linux & then Install from USB

Tried seemingly every method of USB creation, with Fedora 17 -23, Ub untu 12,13 & 14. Nothing booted.
I managed to install rEFInd to 200mb EFI Partition of 8g USB Drive GUID formatted to FAT32. rEFInd boots fine. (Option-key results in EFI-Boot Symbol and clickthrough rEFInd Launch)

My Questions:
(1) Now that rEFInd is installed and boots, should Linux easily boot?
(2) With rEFInd on USB, which is best Linux to boot & install (LiveImage, Full Vers i386 or 64bit)?
(3) What is best to get the version to boot from the USB with all the quirks described?

[Mason Mouse]

I don't know if I can help you out with your problem but I've got virtually the same hardware and I was able to boot Linux Mint from USB and set up a dual boot system with Snow Leopard and Mint. I'm using 64-bit Mate as Cinnamon was causing some video glitching. It's a surprisingly fast system.

[Roderick W. Smith]

The problem is that few distributions support 32-bit EFI-mode booting. To work around this, you must add a 32-bit EFI boot loader to the 32-bit installation medium. There are tutorials floating around on the Internet describing how to do this, but I don't happen to have any URLs handy. Most of these tutorials are written for tablet computers, since many of them have 32-bit EFIs.

Alternatively, you can install Linux in BIOS mode, at which point rEFInd should begin working (if you've got the right filesystem driver installed). The trouble with this is that BIOS-mode booting from USB flash drives is a hit-or-miss proposition -- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You might be able to copy (via dd) the installation .iso file to a disk partition, and install the rEFInd ISO-9660 driver, to get it to work, but I can make no promises about that.