# mid-2010 macbook air, broadcom wireless problem

## Trevoke

I've successfully removed the OSX virus from the Macbook Air and installed Gentoo.

Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me get the wireless to work. I'm not quite sure what docs to follow and what to set up.

So far I have:

- emerged linux-firmware

- emerged b43-fwcutter

- emerged b43-firmware

- enabled what "I THINK" is the correct module in the kernel.

- emerged wpa_supplicant

- emerged whatever gives me iwconfig -- forgot the name of the package.

Does anyone, by chance, know what I need to do to get this working? I'm REALLY confused now.

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## DONAHUE

boot the cd, run 

```
 lspci -nnk | grep -i -A 4 broadcom
```

 and post the result

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## ppurka

According to wikipedia you have a Broadcom 43224 chip. This requires either the proprietary net-wireless/broadcom-sta (which may not work with recent kernels), or the internal brcmsmac driver (which doesn't have power management).

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## DONAHUE

if lspci -nnk indeed shows that you have bcm43224, menuconfig should include: *Quote:*   

> [*] Networking support  --->
> 
>  -*-   Wireless  --->
> 
> <M>   cfg80211 - wireless configuration API
> ...

 recompile kernel with these settings in the chroot, reboot, run ifconfig -a and ifconfig checking for presence of wireless interface.

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## Trevoke

It looks like the only thing I was missing was the Broadcom-specific AMBA stuff in the kernel. Thank you very much!

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## robdd

Hi Trevoke,

I have a MacBook Air 3.1 model, which I hope would be the same model as the one you were working on. I found this thread while trying to get the wireless to work, so thanks to DONAHUE for posting that - that now works. But would you, or anybody who has a working Gentoo install on a MacBook3.1be kind enough to post a copy or link to their kernel .config, and also let me know which is the best video driver to use.

I'm going overseas on holidays in a couple of weeks, and the MacBook is nice and small, so I thought I'd take it along. (The MacBook has been sitting in a cupboard for a while, since I loathe MacOs and the Apple walled garden mentatility. And I didn't buy it myself - more of a joke present from my work partners !)  But it's been an absolute pig to install Gentoo on. I've spent days learning about EUEFI and efibootmgr and how rEFInd works - and I never really had a burning ambition to know about any of that. I installed Linux Mint first to get a system to chroot from, and the nouveau driver in Linux Mint is very flaky - so I'd like to know if I should just use the fbdev driver, or the closed nvidia driver ?? Any help would be gratefully received.

Regards, Rob.

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