as mentioned somewhere else on here i have a 10 year old laptop that was happily running windows 7
it has the usual 10 year old laptop things
a celeron M410 1,46 GHZ
2 gig of ram
an intel gma 950 video card ( bleugh )
60 gig hd
dvd writer
all in all not a power house and probably on the level of a netbook ( there is a point to all this )

i am not doing anything with it so on a whim i downloaded a flavor of buntu and went for xubuntu ( kinda wish i didnt i dont like the interface )
and after installing i found out the bloody thing cant connect to the internet which is kinda important for drivers and software

parole media player face plants when i fast forward
the ethernet port doesnt work
but it has a wifi card a broadcom it seems and thats all i know about it ( hooray ! )

so where and how do i get a driver for this bloody thing ?

i should have gone for mint shouldnt i ?

Ubuntu and Kubuntu are a bit heavy for your configuration. I would go with Lubuntu which is a based on Ubuntu but has a light weight desktop that doesn't use much ressources.

Lubuntu website: http://lubuntu.me/

or Linux Mint with Xfce desktop: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=213

forgotten all about lubuntu

actually the strange thing is that windows 7 was sluggish on this machine with a different 80 gig hd
and the live dvd version of xubuntu was actually faster and more responsive

and thats when i remembered i still have an old 60 gig ps 3 drive

lets see what "science" can do with a 10 year old laptop lubuntu and a 60 gig ps3 laptop

...nothing good i bet

edit : also i managed to run quake 4 on this thing when it still had windows 7
it manged to run in the lowest possible settings
was rather sluggish though but im impressed it ran at all

Are you trying to connect to the internet via wireless LAN or wired LAN? Either way, do you know what network hardware the laptop contains? While pretty much all wired ethernet network devices work in Linux, there are a few wireless devices that have no native drivers. Sometimes it is possible to use windows driver with such devices through a NDIS wrapper, which is a tool to make some wifi windows drivers work in Linux.

wireless
and all i can find out about it is that its a broadcom which is about as helpfull as a soap saw

Oh, yes, Broadcom devices are known to not play well with Linux. In that case, probably your only way to get it work would be by using the Windows driver with that NDIS wrapper contraption, unless you want to resort to using a wired connection or use some USB wifi stick instead. If you have a USB wifi stick lying around, you could try that. Chances are pretty good that it just works.

If there are no Linux drivers for your wireless card, you might be able to get Windows (XP, not Vista or 7) drivers running through ndiswrapper, but if you can do lspci -nn (or, optionally, lshw -numeric, if you have that) and post the output, we may be able to help you find a driver if one exists. Add >file.txt to the end of either command to save the output to a file.

(The -nn/-numeric makes sure the hexadecimal identifiers for both model and manufacturer are present in the output, which usually makes it a bit easier finding the correct driver.)

Make sure you install the "linux-firmware-nonfree" package -- it usually sorts out a number of problems regarding various devices.

EDIT: Just checked one of my WiFi dongles that's working with Linux, and it's a TP-Link one. Chances are, that if you get Internet access, by any means, and manage to install the above package, then you may not need any extra hardware.

Some of them, like my tp link, is plug and play. Try your luck

if you can connect, find additional driver somewhere and see if it can install whatever hardware that has available driver. Ubuntu doesn't recognize my netbook broadcom wifi ootb, but it works after installing driver via additional driver

oh well might as well dig up the tp link

SolydK, which is Debian Stable. Awesome in the long run.

Of note, Debian Stable does have one notable disadvantage: It might not have drivers for really new hardware. In snowkatt's case, that shouldn't be a problem, but if you just bought a brand new laptop, you may want to run something with more up-to-date software at first, like Debian Testing. (You can continue using that version after it freezes and later becomes stable.)

Hm. No. One can use backported kernel. This also includes software.

Debian testing should really not be tampered into, it breaks from time to time. Horribly. It should not be used without apt-listbugs and knowing the way around with package pinning.