Giving away my Dell Latitude D410

Today I decided to give away my Dell Latitude D410 laptop. I bought it second-hand when I was in Montréal, Canada. It was 200 CAD at that time. I liked this laptop but it hasn’t been switched on for many many years. I took some photos of it: https://imgur.com/a/dell-latitude-d410-UkcFPzQ

Specs: 32-bit Pentium M processor, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD.

I gave it to a friend who is not a tech guru. I installed LMDE 6 on it. “LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for ‘Linux Mint Debian Edition’. Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint can continue to deliver the same user experience if Ubuntu was ever to disappear.” (source) LMDE 6 supports 32-bit systems and it’s suitable for old computers, that’s why I chose it. It’s very similar to the normal Linux Mint (Cinnamon). The only difference I noticed was the GUI software updater. It didn’t have the option to select and install the kernel version you want. Otherwise, it had the same look & feel. And it worked relatively well on this old laptop.

Lesson learned: if you want Debian with the goodies of Linux Mint, try LMDE, which combines the best of both worlds.

I only had one issue: the wifi card in the laptop was not recognized. However, after installing the package firmware-b43-installer , the wifi started to work :)

Goodbye, old little laptop. You served me well!

Notes / Links

• LMDE 6 “Faye” released! (blog post announcement)
• LMDE 6 will reach its end-of-life around October 2026. You can verify it here.
• LMDE 7 is newer but it dropped 32-bit support.