Trisquel GNU/Linux 6.0 Meets an Old Laptop

I recently acquired an old laptop (A Dell Latitude) from a friend
that was throwing it out. I love old laptops, they tend to be built
more solidly and have much nicer-feeling keyboards than 'modern'
ones. The lack of horsepower doesn't bother me, as my mostly non-GUI
needs don't require lots of memory, disk or CPU.

Anyway, one catch with the old Dell laptops is that they all have
the Broadcom wireless chipsets that require installing a proprietary
firmware blob under Linux. I first did a Debian CD install, and was
able to get the wireless to work by using a network cable and the
non-free Debian repo. I did a minimal install and left it for a week
or so. Today I had a bit more time to finish setting it up to my
liking, and on a whim decided to boot into my FSF associate member
USB card - it has the latest version of Trisquel GNU/Linux (6.0 LTS)
[0] on it. It gave me a nice live environment that defaulted to
Gnome classic (I guess this is Gnome3 but with settings dialogs and
an app menu), and to my surprise supported the Broadcom wireless
out-of-the-box. This is even more surprising when you consider that
Trisquel's main selling point is that it has no non-free (as in
speech) software in it - including the hardware drivers. So I
decided to install it. So far, it is working quite well and feels
very snappy as I type up this post, even on this old
hardware. Although it is based on Debian, it reminds me of the older
Ubuntu releases, when Gnome2 was the default but with newer (and
completely free) software.

[0] http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-60-lts-toutatis-has-arrived

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