Hi

Ive been looking at various distro for older laptop. I currently happily have Pclos LXDE running, but Puppy has been recommended.

I downloaded the iso and booted it ... it does not recognise my Wifi.

03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 02)

Any ideas please.

Many thanks
Rose

Hi,
Am not at my computer right now. But, had the same problem on a laptop a year or so ago. Did some googling and this is not just a Puppy problem. There is a Broadcom driver w/ tweaks that fixes the problem. I ended up installing Puppy on the harddrive so I could make the changes needed.

Always willing to lend a hand up. But you gotta stand up on your own.

Link

OK,
Back home and trying to remember and reconstruct what I did to correct the problem.

First, the answer is dependent on the version of Puppy that the problem is appearing in. If my memory is correct I solved it in version 5. After trying many fixes, the rkill command made it work. This was a thread that helped me after many false starts:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtop...54fa8b9e4bdb56

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes well I did Google ... in the past I found this forum very helpful, and saw no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Thanks for the link.

Not keen to go into command line, as out of practice ... perhaps I'll give Mint a try.

Thanks for the help.

In case you had chosen to install Puppy,
I think they meant that you 'only' needed to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local to add:
rfkill unblock wlan
modprobe b43

But I can understand someone not wanting to mess with it (I'm in the opposite situation: won't run GUI/X11/whatever-Linux-windows-is-called; only CLI terminals!)

What prompted you to change from PCLinuxOS?

Best wishes... Tell us what distro works out for you. Presario F500 2G?
Me: Asus eeePC 1000HA 2G XP! w/VBox, so Mint is way too huge=slow!

p.s. sorry about the "'DIY' (reinvent the wheel) FIRST" temperament...
(maybe it's because of the proliferation of new 1-shot "do my homework for me" posters)

I may yet install Puppy ... I've kind've got the bug again! Pclos LXDE still my fav of the recent experiments, although I probably would be OK if Wifi had worked on Puppy. I installed Mepis, was intending to dual boot with Pclos, but messed up the partitioning, and made things too small - duh! So out of practice :-)

I've played in the command line before, but not for quite a while. Just have to get brave again, and read some tutorials about navigation.

That was fast! You 'ninja'ed my editing in: What prompted you to change from PCLinuxOS?

Hmmm... I don't think you need any cmd-line-term... There must be a GUI editor, like MSwin Notepad
I would think that would work! But, I'm just guessing....

On distrowatch.com, click Search link at top, then check "Old Computers" & Submit Query

What computer/OS do you use to post on LQ? (F500 PCLinuxOS?)

btw, that "03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311"
is the sign of a lspci-wiz/NON-newbie!

It's not that I want to change from Pclos - I just like to have a play every now and then and see what other distros are like. I've tried many but always end up back with Pclos since I first started using it back in it's early days. I like to keep a Linux stand alone machine in case of disaster with Windows, although I must say 10 seems a lot more stable that some previous versions I've used. I do get a bit fed up with the continuing updates though, because my wireless scanner/printer often needs to be reinstalled afterwards!

I use Pclos Mate or mainly LXDE on the Compaq Presario 500.

I did at one time become reasonably proficient and confident in the command line, and even began to know some of the commands by heart. It has always fascinated me that, that is what is behind the GUI .... I can't tell how amazed I was by that when I first found out, and also the power of CLI to fix things when you mess up!