I recently got an old HP laptop and decided to have a look at different Linux distros for fun. I’ve always liked to try different distros and have used PCLinuxOS and Mint the most. I have many usb sticks and I tried installing many of the most popular distros. But it seems my old laptop has a diificult Broadcom networkcard. All distros failed to set up the wifi connection once installed. Several livecd versions detected my network like every third or fourth time you booted from the usbstick, but once it was installed on the harddrive it was gone, never to appear again. Usually the little hardware light showed yellow to indicate that it wasn’t turned on. Usually I could use the command: ‘rfkill unblock all’ to turn it on but only Mint sometimes was able to pick up a network connection after installation, but next time I booted, it was gone again Then I tried Manjaro for the first time and I liked it, it looked good, and as the first distro from 10 different distros, it never failed to detect my wifi network. When I did a harddrive install it disappeared but I was always able to install wifi again before the first reboot. But once I make the first reboot it … wait for it … is gone and nothing I do, can bring it up again. It doesn’t detect a wifi network even when I use the command above 'rfkill unblock all ’ which seems to turns the little indicator light blue, but I can never make it detect any wifinetwork at all. happy for all suggestions
First of all please use linebreaks when you write things, no one likes to read a wall of text…
Second please use the GUI app mentioned in How to provide good information to generate relevant info, so people can help you better.
Would be nice to have some information about your wifi:
inxi -Nazy
rfkill -r
I would guess there is the wrong module loaded while modprobing and therefore it is not working…
Broadcom wirreless is a special case, because there are 3 different driver. Broadcom wireless - ArchWiki