@OneSadCookie@mastodon.gamedev.place
2026-09-23 23:26 UTC
Need some #linux help — I have an old (~2014) MacBook Air I'd like to resurrect. I have two problems:
1) it has broadcom wifi
2) it is old and slow (2 cores, 4GB)
I've struggled to find a distro which is both
a) slim enough to even boot on this machine (Fedora does, Ubuntu doesn't), and
b) comes with a broadcom driver, or at least lets me install it simply over a bluetooth tether (e.g. the Fedora instructions have me downloading a third-party kernel)
Anyone know how to thread this needle?
Replies (1)
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com 2026-09-23 23:31
@OneSadCookie@mastodon.gamedev.place having a thunderbolt or usb ethernet adapter to bootstrap will help things. i don't recall having much problem getting Arch, Alpine, or Debian installed on my 2011 Air once the broadcom firmware was installed. the linux broadcom driver did seem to have a bad habit of hard freezing the system though. i had better stability under freebsd (though you'll need to build a custom kernel with the bwn driver and GPL phy implementations enabled) https://duriansoftware.com/joe/freebsd-installation-notes-for-a-2011-macbook-air