Hello to all helpers and thank you to all responders. I am not sure where to post this as it could be either HARDWARE or SOFTWARE! I have a HP 8230 Laptop on which I have tried 45 or 47 Linuxes. None of them has recognizes the on board wireless, at least It never shows up. I have been trying all the Live CD/DVD trials. As I am a complete neubi to Linux, I do not understand some of the posts I've searched for on the web about this kind of problem. Has anyone heard of this laptop working on Linux? Again all suggestions appreciated. This computer supposedly has what they call a Broadcom wireless.

I hope you had another reason to try 45 versions of Linux....

Generally, changing distros to solve a specific problem will only get you more frustrated.

using Google, I found a spec that says that computer uses the Intel 2200 wireless. Lot's of distros have that out of the box.

To be sure what you have, open a terminal and enter "lspci" (no quotes)

Hello pixellany and thank you for your post. As I do not have any Linux installed at the moment, The system is still running the orriginal Media Center XP OS.My further found info is,***************************
From HP Site on the zd8280us page
54g™ 802.11b/g WLAN with 125HSM / SpeedBooster™ and BroadRange™ support & Bluetooth™ Then Running Windows Systeminfo on the Laptop, returns;
IRQ 17 Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM PCI Express Root Port-2660 Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN.Does this information help at all? Thanks again for your attention to my problem.

Google using "broadcom wireless linux" gives a lot of promising hits--eg the one on Ubuntu forums. The thing to do is pick any one of the mainstream distros, and install it. (Don't try to set up wireless when you are running from a live CD.)

Once you have Linux installed and working, it will be much easier for us to provide specific help.

If possible, connect the computer with a regular wired connection before installing Linux. Most installers will now automatically detect and configure the connection. This way, you can immediately start using the package manager to install things (including the wireless driver...)