I decided to update my old HP 530 Laptop from Mint 9 (Superb - totally fault free!) to Mint 13 Cinnamon 32. Installation went well. After install I tried to add additional drivers to pick up the wireless (broadcom)connection. The install crashed.

I have searched the forums and tried various "solutions" which have all failed - and worse, now Synaptic has failed with errors flagging E: cache open or somesuch.

So, now I need to get Synaptic working again and need to find the wireless solution.

Can anyone suggest a genuine solution for this newby who is giving up the will to live ....

What exactly do you mean by 'crashed'? Define 'old'. Did you check the minimum hardware requirements?

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031

Hi Yancek

Thanks for the reply. The laptop is around 5 years old - Celeron, 1Gb Ram, Broadcom b4311 wireless card. Yes, the hardware requirements appeared to be fine and the system ran from the DVD - but without wireless as I had no net connection when I ran the DVD.

Oh poo!!!! I missed this:

"Important info:

Boot hangs on systems with b43 wireless cards" DOH!!!

Mint 9 installed without problems on this machine first time and has been error free for 3 years.

I can't believe that Mint 13 LTS is useless on this machine. Guess it's back to Mint 9.

Sorry for making a dumb post. Hope it helps someone else.

Why not try something a little newer... like Mint 14 or 15?

The best reason for using Mint 13 rather than later versions is that it will be supported long after support for 14 and 15 ends:

http://www.linuxmint.com/oldreleases.php

One thing you might do is go to the Mint site and read the release notes and see if you can find anything indicating the problem has been resolved. If so, that would be a good reason to switch.

1 members found this post helpful.

True... I'd forgotten about certain Mint releases being tied to the Ubuntu LTS schedule.

That being said... the hardware in question is already 5 years old. Expecting to get another four out of commodity PC hardware, and a laptop at that, might be stretching it a bit. Not impossible, just not what I'd consider a good return on the investment (in terms of effort).

YMMV,

Monte

The solution was - reinstall Mint 9. Flawless first time. Life is just too short to fight this hard with a machine.

Thanks for your help / advice and comments. :-D