I've tested the Snow Leopard disk on my Mac Mini and it worked fine.
I loaded the 64 bit version of Mint via the optical drive on the Macbook pro, so I know it works.
Your machine is having a kernel panic when you go to boot it from that particular disc. The likely explanation is that either the EFI version for that model or the model itself was released subsequent to 10.6.0 and it needs a newer version.
Rather than screw around with what is now a deprecated OS X version, why don't you just upgrade it to Macericks?
Since he has other Macs, he could also pull the HD from the MBP and put it in an external case to reformat and install OS X
My 2010 Macbook Pro came with 10.5, I upgraded to 10.6
If it is a kernel panic, how to do fix that?
Did you upgrade anything hardware-wise from new? For example, did you did you add memory? If so, try putting the factory memory back in - particularly if you didn't purchase the memory from a top tier vendor.
Aside from that, it's possible that Apple issued a firmware update along the way that rendered it incompatible with earlier versions,
Again, why not upgrade it to Mavericks? It's free - and with Apple likely dropping update support for 10.6 this year, you don't want to be running it at this point on an Internet-connected machine.
I did upgrade the memory and the hard drive but that was months ago.
Up until the 23rd of this month (a scant 3 days ago), the only update I did not download and install was something about the Apple store.
It's good to hear you've sorted this out, just in case you decide to experiment with Ubuntu again, have a look at Full Circle magazine, scroll down to page 19, and you'll see a very informative article entitled 'Put Ubuntu on a Mac' - that should give you all the answers