DeepakNess

Linux Mint Wi-Fi and failed update fix on 2014 MacBook Pro

After the Fedora 44 test, I wiped the old MacBook Pro and installed Linux Mint 22 on it, and accepted the Broadcom driver installation that the Driver Manager popup showed. But then the first system update failed, so I spent some time and finally got it fixed.

The update pulled in the HWE kernel 7.0.0-30, and DKMS couldn't rebuild the proprietary wl driver for it, so linux-headers-7.0.0-30-generic, linux-headers-generic-hwe-24.04, linux-generic-hwe-24.04, and linux-image-7.0.0-30-generic were left unconfigured. By the way, the Wi-Fi was working on the old 6.14 kernel.

Then, canonical patches wl 6.30.223.271 for every kernel bump, and while 23ubuntu1.2 fixed 6.17, only 23ubuntu1.3 in noble-proposed has the linux-7.0 fix. I booted into 6.14, and ran this.

echo 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-proposed restricted' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/noble-proposed.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install broadcom-sta-dkms=6.30.223.271-23ubuntu1.3
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/noble-proposed.list
sudo apt update
sudo reboot

The driver install builds wl for 7.0, and dpkg --configure -a finishes the stuck packages. After reboot, uname -r showed 7.0.0-30-generic, lsmod | grep wl showed the module loaded, and nmcli device status showed wlp2s0 connected on 5 GHz.

The locale warnings in the update output went away after sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales with en_IN.UTF-8 selected, because en_IN.ISO8859-1 was never generated on the system. And for next time, b43 doesn't support this BCM4360's AC revision, installing the driver after the update wouldn't have helped either, and after any future kernel update the same check applies.

Can look at apt-cache policy broadcom-sta-dkms for a newer version in noble-proposed.