Howdy. I've installed Bodhi on an ancient laptop in an attempt to make it usable.
Since I have next to no knowledge about linux systems, I seem to just run into issue after issue while trying to fix things.

First off, I have no option to connect to wifi (but I have internet access via cable). Most likely a missing driver, which I've tried to, unsuccessfully, search for an answer online for.

Since I can't find an answer I can apply myself due to my inexperience, I head to this forum to find help.
That's when Midori crashes. It seems to happen every time I visit this forum, but works fine on other size (though I've only ran a small test sample).

And because the forum keeps crashing Midori, I figure installing Chrome might get me around that issue.
But I can't even get to install that. Whenever I attempt to download the package for it, all it does is create an empty file and not actually downloading it.

Sidenote: I'm posting from my main computer. Searching for answers earlier usually had people ask for various info/terminal outputs. Since I can't access the forum from the Bodhi laptop, is there a (somewhat) easy way to copy any such info off the laptop to my main computer?

I'd be very grateful for any help to try and fix these issues

To find out what is missing, we need to know what hardware you have installed. To do that, open a command prompt, and run the command 'lspci' and look through the list if items listed. If you have a pci attached WIFI card, there will be a line or two describing it. Copy and paste the lines here between quote tags. From there we can find the driver. Ods are on an older laptop you already have it.

Is Midori part of the Bodhi install, or did you install it after the original install? If you installed it after the original, where did you get it?

For now, forget chrome. If you want another browser, find one in the Bodhi repos, and install from there.

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there is a place to edit network connections in the settings menu under the preferences tab or icon. alternately, if you have a network connection icon in your system tray, you can right-click on that and choose "edit connections". either method should let you start to try and add a wifi connection if one isn't already present by pressing the + in the bottom left of the Network Connections popup window.

To copy between machines, just plug in a USB key. Bodhi will probably mount it automatically and you will be able to navigate to it in your file manager and pull files over onto it. It's quicker to do it at the command line, but the graphical way works too. Then plug the key into your desktop and do the same in reverse. It's the modern version of sneakernet (someone going upstairs with a pile of floppies).

To start fixing the missing driver problem, the first thing you need to find out is what wifi chip you have. There are several ways of doing that but they all involve typing some command into a terminal. lspci, as suggested, is one such command: it lists all the devices connected to your pci bus.

A lot of laptops have broadcom chips, which need an extra bit of firmware called b43.

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Thanks guys, but I'm gonna have to give up on this. The laptop seems too far gone, I can't even apply updates without the machine hanging or other issues.
Appreciate you trying to help though

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It sounds a little like it has severe performance issues; what are the specs? CPU, RAM, hard drive, Graphics?

I wish OP would specify what that "ancient laptop" is. For the record here's mine powered by Bodhi 5. Well enough to allow me doing various things rather confortably (eg. browse the web a bit intensively, manage emails, watch HD vids, synchronize most of my data, and so on) :

Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 (bought in Jan. 2010)
- Atom N450 "Pineview" (1.66 GHz - Cache L2 512 ko - FSB 667 MHz)
- 2 GB DDR2 RAM
- 120 GB SSD Intel 540s

Browser wise. I've checked and tested about 15 different browsers against my needs and my favorite so far is Palemoon. Currently writing through it with about 15 others tabs, system update running in the background, no prob at all. Boot time (from BIOS) is 23 to 45 sec.

My laptop has a single core Intel cpu (I can't remember the model out of the top of my head) and 1 GB of core. It runs AntiX and runs it very well. It's a bit slow with Firefox so I prefer graphical Links. No problems with updates.

In my experience, if you want to install linux on an old laptop you had better not try Bodhi. Yes it is minimal. But the problem is that most things don't work at all. Which is good for testing your Buddhist skills of remaining composed and non-judgemental and patient ... but if you want to get Linux running fast on an old computer there are many, many better choices...

Yet many people use Bodhi succesfully.
Your other post wasn't very helpful in finding a solution to your problem either: no hard info. Maybe you want to re-read the LQ rules after 15 years, formulate a good question in a dedicated thread?

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I am not a big fan of the provided Wifi package.

Wifi: Install wicd. Do you use apt?
apt install wicd
should do it.

The same thing with browsers. There are so many. Instead of chrome try chromium.
Opera https://deb.opera.com/manual.html
Vivaldi.
Firefox.

I assume firefox should work out of the box if installed with apt without adding any repositories
try
apt install firefox
or
sudo apt install firefox

updating with eepdater will hang. better to use a terminal. use these commands;

will update sources.list
will update all needed pieces of software on your system
will clean/remove unneeded software/libraries after the upgrade.


another thing to consider is that bodhi uses a swap file as the default swap space. on an older system this may use
needed hard disk space. I have had better success after creating a swap drive and using that rather than a file.
1) separates the swap space from drive storage. I find that this allows for less 'dynamic' actions in / drive.
2) the swap drive should be at least twice the size of the physical RAM on the system.
3) you will want to look into the following commands in the man pages; swapon, swapoff, mkswap.
4) also look into how to adjust swappiness to tailor to your system's needs. net searches will give you much info on these subjects.

I would also recommend doing 'lspci' in terminal and look for the wireless card on the system. Then do net search on how to install needed third party drivers for your specific card. I had to install drivers for my Broadcom 4312 card using an ethernet connection.

^ good advice there.
But...
This is a misleading term coined by MS Windows.
Misleading because "drive" suggests an actual physical hard drive; but what you really mean are disk partitions.
A swap partition.

This might be a noddy question, but did you reboot after install? I find the wifi icon doesn't appear until after rebooting. I like using Bodhi on very old hardware. It works very well and speedily on an eee pc with an 8gb drive - with 1GB ram 0.9GHz celeron processor and very basic graphics.

After install has finished, it asks you to reboot and remove the install drive. Once you've done that, and the desktop is loaded. Reboot again. The wifi icon should be there, ready to connect to wifi. If your pc has a wifi card!

The next thing - before trying to install Chrome - is do all updates. At the moment this is taking quite a long time as it updates to 5.1 (just did it yesterday). The odd question along the way (just type y and hit return). It asks what keyboard you're using (I selected generic 100 keys and had no issues even though I don't have 100 keys!). To answer the questions that come up in a box use the tab bar to select yes or no and hit return. The only thing I didn't answer "y" to was grub - putting "n" doesn't upgrade grub.

Ok so all updates done, reboot again. Then add Chromium from the Bodhi software centre. Don't try and use Midhori to download Chrome from the internet. Downloading things from the internet will not play well - use the software centre or the terminal.

Last thing - did you burn the "legacy" iso? You'll need that one.