Linux on my 2017 Macbook Air

#life

My 2017 Macbook Air has seen better days. I bought it in 2018, knowing that I would be starting teaching at Smith College in the fall, and wanting access to both Powerpoint and the terminal.

In Summer 2020, the Zoom app started causing kernel panics. Unable to find any information about this crash on the internet, I assumed there was a hardware failure, and put the laptop (sadly) into a pile of hardware that couldn’t be trusted to teach online, which was quite the requirement at the time.

I pulled it out that fall to do Nanowrimo, since I preferred the keyboard (and still do) to many more modern designs.

Having had a hardware catastrophe in the family, and rarely using my own personal computers anymore, I traded the newer laptop to another human, and pulled out my elderly laptop into more frequent usage.

And boy, does MacOS rot once it stops being supported. The behavior of trying to reopen the apps you had open every time you log in; the plague of Microsoft auto-updaters, and other software desperately trying to update in the background…

Installing Linux on the 2017 Macbook Air

Anyway, I installed linux. I had the latest Pop-OS (the 22.04 version) sitting around on a flash drive.

It went pretty smoothly, with two exceptions, both of which are due to the broadcom wifi: Oh, Broadcom Wifi, I remember your pains from 2009. Suffice to say that the landscape has changed a lot since then.

  1. The wifi did not work on the live-CD, but I have a little USB TP-link adapter that plays very nice with Linux.
  2. I needed to switch to the proprietary wl driver, which meant downloading it (see point 1) and preventing the in-tree drivers from loading.

Preferring the Proprietary Broadcom Driver

lspci | grep BCM
sudo rmmod b43
sudo rmmod bcma
sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
# blacklist bcma
# blacklist b43
sudo apt install broadcom-sta-dkms 
sudo modprobe wl
sudo vim /etc/modules 
# wl

Update (Nov 2024): webcam

I claimed everything worked under linux, but I haven’t gotten the magical incantation for the webcam right yet.