installing-the-broadcom-wireless-drivers-on-a-mac-in-ubuntu-debian-and-debian-derivatives.md

Installing the Broadcom wireless drivers on a Mac in Ubuntu, Debian, and Debian derivatives

#linux #mac #broadcom #hardware

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⚠️ Although this procedure has been tested on a MacBook Air 6,2, it may vary depending on your hardware. If you have a different device or if your process differs from the instructions below, please leave a comment so that I can update this guide accordingly.

Before following the instructions below, make sure your machine is connected to a network. If your machine doesn't have an Ethernet adapter, you can use your phone's hotspot via USB.

After installing the Broadcom wireless driver, you may observe that the initial ramdisk is updated automatically. However, for unknown reasons, this update does not correctly add the driver to the kernel. To fix this issue, we need to remove and re-add the driver using modprobe. Additionally, we have to rebuild the initramfs once again and reboot for the driver to start working properly.

Ubuntu 23.04

# install packages
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install dkms bcmwl-kernel-source

# insert driver into kernel and update initial ramdisk
sudo modprobe -rf wl
sudo modprobe -vv wl
sudo update-initramfs -c -k all

# reboot to activate driver
sudo shutdown -r now

Debian 11 and derivatives

The bcmwl-kernel-source package is not available in Debian. As an alternative, we can use the broadcom-sta-dkms package instead.

# install packages
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install dkms broadcom-sta-dkms

# insert driver into kernel and update initial ramdisk
sudo modprobe -rf wl
sudo modprobe -vv wl
sudo update-initramfs -c -k all

# reboot to activate driver
sudo shutdown -r now