I do have this old laptop. Dell Latitude D810. It is otherwise quite ok, display resolution is excellent, CPU power is enough for browsing etc. The only thing that bothers me is the lack of memory, or so to say the limits of memory you can use. 2 GB of memory is nowadays below the minimum.

However, it manages to keep my writing going on and web browsing is actually easier and more efficient than with the Asus Eee PC 1101HA, which seems to lack the rest of everything you need to work around.

Ok, enough babbling. Back to the actual topic:

Installation procedure was pretty simple (this time).

• Download Ubuntu 15.04 (32-bit version)
• Write the downloaded image to USB disk:
  1. Plug in the USB
  2. umount /dev/sdb (in case needed, I didn’t have to, my Arch linux did not automount the disk)
  3. ]$ dd bs=4M if=Downloads/ubuntu-15.04-desktop-i386.iso /dev/sdb
  4. Eject the USB -stick (eject /dev/sdb )
• Plug in the USB stick to Dell Latitude D810
• During the Start Up, press F12 and select USB device as the boot device
• During the installation process, do not select the 3rd party software to be installed, it halts the computer.
• If you have network cable, plug it in during the installation procedure and download the updates during the installation
• After installation, restart the computer
• When computer has been restarted, do the following:
  1. Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T)
  2. Run the following commands:

  ]$ sudo apt-get update
  ]$ sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
  ]$ sudo modprobe -r b43 bcma
  ]$ sudo modprobe -r brcmsmac bcma
  ]$ sudo modprobe b43

• Restart the computer

The information gathered above can be also found from Ubuntu WifiDocs -site. All I did was gathered it in a simplified list to be applied. Most likely the same approach should work to Debian, too.