Ahhh! Those Wireless blues!

[TheDead]

Con ni chi wah,
Suggestions needed, heres the situation:A friend of mine liked my Linux Lite installation and tried to install Linux Lite on an old nc6400 HP Laptop (1GB, 80GB HDD, had WinXP). He tried LL4 but wireless card didn't show (after updates and drivers scan either). He's pretty sure it has a WiFi card inside but it's really old so...

He brought me the beast. I dont see a WiFi card in the BIOS but lots of laptops don't show it there either.

I tried live booting 3.8 and even 2.8 wihout success on wireless.
I then tried current/previous gen versions of Bodhi, Mint, Zorin, DFLinux, Deepin, Manjaro, PepperMint and Porteus. MX would not boot on it.Results vary. Some show the Bluetooth adapter, some have the Wireless switch working but only for bluetooth.But, none see a Wireless card.Tried lspci/hardinfo, nothing found in listings.
EDIT : Forgot to mention that on Linux 3.8, I tried 10 different Kernels from 4.15 to 4.1, 4.1 had corrupted display - also tried 5.x (I don't remember version) and that didn't work, no boot).
EDIT2 : Everything was 32bits, because 1GB.

Laptop has some special antitheft screws (it was a company laptop) so it will be hard to open it.
Is there any other way/command than what I tried to be sure there IS a WiFi card in there?

[trinidad]

Use a live 3,8 disk and try: $ lshw -C network | more
Also you could default the BIOS and rescan hardware.
Beyond that Wifi is either dysfunctional or not present.

As far as lspci here is good link: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-find...r-chipset/
You could also try dmidecode: https://linux.die.net/man/8/dmidecode

TC

[TheDead]

Thanks trinidad!

Solved the problem. Well, at least found it.
Broke a screwdriver in the process also with those anti-theft screws.
Anyways... There was a modem, bluetooth and cellular device, but no WiFi Card.
That's a pretty good reason not to find one.

Should not have doubted what Linux Lite was saying LOL.

[torreydale]

[member=6733]TheDead[/member] ,

Consider this:
https://tinyurl.com/y2zoavnt 

[TheDead]

Thanks for the hint torreydale, but I already got an Asus mini WiFi USB adapter like that.

My adapter heats up like crazy though so just waiting for it to litteraly "burn-out" to change it
Over the years I went to quite  few of these USB adapters in fact, mostly D-Link's. There cheap, but just don't last.

Got a thrusty old Cisco USB Wireless-G on backup just in case. It's like a minivan, big and slow but gets you there.