I have just purchased a HP envy 4m and have loaded slackware 14 on it. I can not get the wireless to work. I have run lspci with several different options. It does not appear to recognize any wireless card, only a single ethernet controller. I do have a wireless controller somewhere, because I used it when my laptop still had windows 8. Now, it has only linux, so I can not go back to windows 8 to try to identify the wireless controller. I have also tried lsusb. Does this mean that the linux kernel does not have a driver for whatever wireless controlled that I have?

You should not need a driver loaded to identify the controller.

'lspci' lists the devices on the PCI bus. 'lsusb' list the devices on the USB bus.

Where is the device installed? Internally mounted cards usually end up on the PCI bus. If this device plugs into a USB port, then only lsusb will list it.

If you are plugging it into a USB port, look at the output of lsusb before, and after you plug it. Compare, at a minimum, you should see a Device entry followed by an ID field. Three may not be any words following the ID field. That can be fixed. There is a file the manufacturer and device ID are looked up in. If that is not up to date, the words don't appear. The device will not work without a driver, so you need to identify the device.

If you can not find the device at all, that is a bigger issue.

sThey are a bit coy about the wifi. Is it a pc card or built in?

On a distro kernel, it should show with lspci or lsusb. HP are fond of broadcom parts. Post the output of lsusb as root, or lspcmcia if it's a pc card.