How to use internal Wi-Fi of HP-530 laptop? (Solved)

[Tattyjacket]

Hi Group,
I'm trying to breath new life into two elderly laptops. My aim is to put some educational software onto the machines so that my grandchildren can gain some experience.
My Acer Aspire One netbook is running just fine. In the past, this machine has run Linpus, Lubuntu and Mint but Puppy appears to be far more responsive.

The other machine is a HP 530 laptop. Everything works but it doesn't appear to have activated the internal wireless doohdad.

Is there a piece of code that I need to get this to activate? OR, should I buy myself a new wifi dongle?

Thanks,
Phil

[ozsouth]

Welcome. So that we can help, would you please run the following commands in a terminal & post output.

lspci | grep -i network

dmesg | grep -i firmware

[Tattyjacket]

Hi group,

I found an old disused wifi dongle. Placed it into the slot and TAADAA....I now have wifi.

Thanks,
Phil

[peterw]

Googling the HP-530, I think that it has a Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 chip on the network card which is closed source? However, looking at a Slacko it appears that the firmware is in /lib/firmware as it has the b43 and the b43legacy directories. So it should work.

USB wifi dongles can easily get damaged and using the internal wifi card will be better. Of course if you have another old laptop you could use its wifi card or you buy another on ebay. As long as it has the same pinout then any will work in linux.