The "bug" is HP only connects one of the antennae input of the wifi card. So, linux can use the card in theory (it has the drivers), but in practice it doesn't work unless the wifi ap is very close. The solution is to force its conf file to use the other antennae. (ant_sel = 2).

In ubuntu you had to download a driver sourcecode, compile it and modprobe it to the system but to my surprise latest fedora core worked when I did the conf magic I mentioned, so maybe the updated versions use the rtlwifi package.

It's just incompatibility between hardware and software. HP's official drivers for Windows work perfectly, but no such privilege to Linux users.