Dell Mini 9 (ours is red, not pink)

My elementary-school-aged daughter wanted her own laptop.  However, I wouldn’t want to spend several hundred dollars on a computer only to have her step on it, throw something at the screen, or snap the power cord off in the jack.  My solution was to dust off an old Dell Mini 9 that had been sitting around since it stopped recognizing its battery and load Ubuntu on it.  The reason for the Ubuntu rather than the native Windows that came with the laptop is that it would take forever to do anything with all the Windows updates.

And, Ubuntu1 was just fine – except that the wifi adapter wouldn’t work.  After a bit of searching, I finally found the solution and am documenting it here as much for myself as for you, dear reader.

1. Connect the laptop to the internet via an ethernet cable
2. Bring up a terminal window by hitting CTRL + Alt + T2
3. Type “sudo apt-get update” into the terminal window and hit Enter.
4. Wait for the update to finish.
5. Type “sudo apt-get –reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source” in the terminal window and hit Enter.
6. Wait for the update to finish, restart the computer and you should be ready to go! 3

1. This was actually my first foray into using Ubuntu [↩]
2. I learned how to do this here [↩]
3. The original site where I learned this fix appears to have been taken over by malware – so I used Archive.org to visit an earlier version [↩]