Tried JustBrowsing and Slax but cant configure wifi connection? Puppy is on USB which isnt detected by the Laptop??
I want to run a Live USB distro on a 1gb flash drive to be used with HP 15-g259sa(5 yr old) but HDD broken. I thought this would be a lot easier than this!

My target is to use the above to surf the internet with Chrome(or firefox if need be) and use my Broadcom wifi card in my HP laptop, but I cant seem to find linux drivers for the wifi either. Can someone help.

What method and on which operating system are you trying to create a bootable usb?
Have you used a usb drive previously to boot on this machine? A 5 year old machine should be able to boot a usb.

edited
Read it wrong.

Next is probably the correct answer.

Broadcom wireless requires a "nonfree" firmware, so it won't work "out of the box" with most Linux distributions. You'll need to take some steps as the user to activate the Broadcom firmware.

A very easy way to achieve Linux + Broadcom is to run a Live USB of the latest Linux Mint. Once you are booted to the Linux Mint desktop, run the Driver Manager and activate the Broadcom driver. More detailed help is available on the Mint website. In my opinion, Linux Mint is one of the most beginner-friendly Linux distributions.

Good luck and welcome!

......or if you need a lighter distro than Mint, take a look at AntiX.

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

P.S. If it's just a dead HDD, you could always replace it.

I'm not sure where snowpine got the Broadcom information. Maybe he consulted the datasheet on the HP computer. I am writing this message on an Acer Aspire One on which I installed Slackware around 2012. Yes, getting the Broadcom card was a real challenge. I haven't tried to install an OS on this Acer Aspire 722 lately, but I have been compiling the kernel of late, and I noticed 3 modules for Broadcom in the kernel sources. Maybe the situation is different now?

About the Live USB distro: I had some amount of good luck on a Gentoo Live USB. I was able to get access to the Multi-Media Chip (MMC) on an Acer Cloudbook 431, and had to fight hard on my beloved Slackware. :^(

No matter what LiveUSB you have luck with, I recommend that you run lsmod on the distro that works, caputre it to a file, put that file on a usbstick, and copy it onto your machine into the root directory of the kernel sources, and then run make LSMOD=file.lsmod localmodconfig. As follows:

usbstick # lsmod > usbstick.lsmod
usbstick # cp usbstick.lsmod /mnt/someother-memstick
usbstick # umount /mnt/someother-memstick
reboot to the HP installation that you are trying to fix
hp # mount /mnt/someother-memstick
hp # cd /usr/src/linux
hp # cp /mnt/someother-memstick/usbstick.lsmod .
hp # make LSMOD=usbstick.lsmod localmodconfig

See README in /usr/src/linux.

good luck!