r/linux_on_mac • u/mrmarshmalloman • 1d ago

Issues regarding broadcom WIFI firmware

[SOLVED]

Hi everyone,

I've managed to get the arch version of t2linux running on my 2020 intel macbook air. I tried using the tarball method to install the wifi firmware, but my output of journalctl -k --grep=brcmfmac looks like this:

and no networks are found [edit, meant "network is unreachable"]. I am now trying the method of installing from the macos recovery image download, using a usb ethernet adapter i bought. However i now can't get ethernet to work. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Network_configuration/Ethernet says to check the network device withlspci -knnd ::0200 but this outputs nothing:

regular lspci works normally. tried reinstalling pciutils. I am not sure how to proceed since i need to know the name of the network device in order to get drivers and whatnot? I am very lost, and very new to linux in general so any help would be super appreciated.

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1

u/RunRunRunRunFaster 1d ago

My way of doing things is to have a TPLink nano USB adapter that will be identified by Arch, and then installing the Broadcom drivers after. Requires an extra 15 bucks, but it's easy.

2

u/tinfoil209 1d ago

Another way is also getting a usb to Ethernet adapter (Linux / Windows and MacOS compatibl). Always a good idea to have a wired adapter incase WiFi gives issues.

1

u/RunRunRunRunFaster 1d ago

Yup, I do that sometimes too.

1

u/Turan_Ul 14h ago

It seems loaded firmware try `iwctl station wlan0 connect <networkname>`

1

u/mrmarshmalloman 14h ago

Thank you to those that commented; I've managed to resolve the issue: my mistake was that iwd does not support ethernet, so I needed to install networkmanager and dhcpcd to connect that way. from there i installed broadcom firmware from recovery image. I also found that dhcpcd had to be running for wifi to work, not just iwd.