I have this Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that I bought new probably 8 years ago. Has Windows Vista in it. 2GB ram and 120GB HD Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Its always been a good laptop and always liked the look and feel. Its very clean and hate to get rid of it but got tired of dealing with the Windows updates and this and that that won't be supported anymore etc... Didn't want to update Windows so I thought I'd give Linux a try.
I downloaded Debian with KDE first and tried a live DVD installation. Booted up and everything worked except the WiFi. This laptop has a Broadcom chip in it and there are all kinds of comments about trying to make that work. Played around a bit but no immediate luck. So I thought I'd try a different flavor. Looked at Ubuntu. Seems as though more people had good luck getting that to work on this model laptop so I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to give that a try. Wow! Everything worked out of the box! I was so impressed that I went ahead and did a dual boot install. I was going to eliminate Windows all together but just in case the Ubuntu didn't work out I'd thought I'd wait.
This thing flies now. Quick boot up etc. Now I'm looking at upgrading the RAM to 4GB and putting in a 250GB SSD. I'm not sure how to preserve the Windows portion to transfer to new SSD but will look into that.
Pretty happy thus far...
I have an old desktop tower that the hard drive failed in. so, I installed Linux mint, and am having the same wifi issues. its a wifi dongle, the very model every one uses on raspberry pi's. Does anyone know a link to a solution to this? or know how to solve it? Ive tried several times but after a while, the command line in Linux starts to grate on my nerves, and I walk away for a day where my patience rebuilds! lol
I don't know about "everyone uses on the raspberry pi" I just use any random off the shelf WIFI dongles on the Pi and PC. As does everyone else I know.
As it happened the Debian Jessie with KDE installation I recently put up here on an ancient PC detected the WIFI dongle and used it with no problem. I was somewhat surprised, that is the first time I have ever seen a Linux system do that!
I would imagine the best place for advice is the Linux Mint forum. As Mint seems to be some weird mashup of Debian and Ubuntu any advice I could offer is probably wrong.
I do recall once having to install a firmware package for a WIFI dongle.
So the procedure was something like:
1) Plug the dongle in and see if it detected and what it is:
$ lsusb
Bus 008 Device 003: ID 148f:5370 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter
...
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I have an old desktop tower that the hard drive failed in. so, I installed Linux mint, and am having the same wifi issues. its a wifi dongle, the very model every one uses on raspberry pi's. Does anyone know a link to a solution to this? or know how to solve it? Ive tried several times but after a while, the command line in Linux starts to grate on my nerves, and I walk away for a day where my patience rebuilds! lol
I don't know about "everyone uses on the raspberry pi" I just use any random off the shelf WIFI dongles on the Pi and PC. As does everyone else I know.
As it happened the Debian Jessie with KDE installation I recently put up here on an ancient PC detected the WIFI dongle and used it with no problem. I was somewhat surprised, that is the first time I have ever seen a Linux system do that!
I would imagine the best place for advice is the Linux Mint forum. As Mint seems to be some weird mashup of Debian and Ubuntu any advice I could offer is probably wrong.
I do recall once having to install a firmware package for a WIFI dongle.
So the procedure was something like:
1) Plug the dongle in and see if it detected and what it is:
2) Google for the Debian firmware package for it.
Something like : https://packages.debian.org/jessie/firmware-ralink
3) Install that with apt-get
4) Configure it in /etc/network/interfaces
auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-ssid someSSID wpa-psk someKey