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I have an HP Pavillion p027 TX Notebook PC with the following hardware:
Intel core i3 4030@1.90 GHZ and 4 GB RAM
NVIDIA GEFORCE 830 M
Broadcom 43142 Bluetooth
Broadcom 43142 b/g/n wifi adapter
Realtek Ethernet Card.
This laptop came pre installed with windows 8.1. I removed that and tried installing various linux distributions but each of them had the specific problems listed below:
Ubuntu - Does not remember brightness settings. Also it is very slow to boot and runs very slowly.
Fedora - The Fedora 21 version does not support my wifi card in its RPM repositories.
Linux Mint - It does not support my wi fi card.
Kubuntu - Window manager does not work after uodate. Tried re installing KDE and also applied some patches from the online forums, but it did not work.
Lubuntu works but it is too minimalistic
Which linux distribution is most suited for a laptop with such configurations ? I have been using linux on my desktop PC since about a year, but I am still an amateur.
The major problem I get in all the distributions is that my wi fi card is not supported. Is there any good distribution that may work properly ?
Broadcom is a known problem to millions of linux users. Realtek is more simple but some versions are also in need of having a driver on hand before you attempt.
So, I'd get the wifi driver and install what you want. Worse comes to worse you could get a fully supported wifi usb adapter for $9 or similar wired. The installed wired ought to work too by default in most distros.
that broadcom chipset is supported in the "wl" driver. in the debian world, the driver is supplied by the package broadcom-sta-dkms. This driver is included by default in MX-14. The chip is also supported by the "b43" driver, also included in MX (not enabled by default) and antiX. (see my signatures for info). I would have thought that at least b43 would have been included in all the major distros.
as to your backlight, I use a little app called "xbacklight" to set the backlight where I want it. I also use an HP laptop. the syntax is pretty simple
xbacklight --set 70
will set the backlight to 70%. I set that command to autorun at login as my backlight tends to default to 100% (which is better than 0% though, which also happens with some kernel versions).
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