DennisMooreAU
commented
2 years ago Hi There!
I've been banging my head against a wall for three days and can't get past a Broadcom WiFi issue on my MacBook Air 6,2. I'm hoping someone can help me get brunch going. I'm trying hard not to let this beat me, but I'm sensing defeat.
Here is what I've done (countless reboots and experimentation omitted)...
- I started with Rammus 84 and, using a bootable USB stick, got as far as the white CHROME logo screen where it froze.
- Moved on to Rammus 86 because I read somewhere that it worked for someone.
- It booted fine and I got the WiFi to work (by adding the 'options=broadcom_wl' in grub during boot). WiFi only worked incredibly briefly - long enough to log-in and that was it. No matter what I did I couldn't get WiFi to restart. It's not clear if the experience of @vervallsweg above included never being able to get WiFi going a second time, or if rebooting helped. I got it to work once only.
- Somehow, regardless of what I did, I could get to a browser (past the "GET STARTED" stuff). I don't understand how, or how Chrome knew who I was (my login name) despite entirely wiping the USB stick a number of times and having no WiFi to connect something like a serial number to a database to decipher who I was.
- I gave up with Rammus 86 and noticed that edit-grub-config was added with the later releases so I went to Rammus 94, thinking 96 might be a little too 'bleeding edge' to address my WiFi issue.
- The boot screen gives the option enter into edit-grub-config to set the grub options, but the menu freezes, requiring reboot.
- Booting into ChromeOS, I can open a terminal (CTRL+ALT+F3), login as chronos and then sudo su to run edit-grub-config from the command line. The font on the non-graphical screen is huge and I get a message that I must maximize the terminal window before using edit-grub-config. At this point the only option is to reboot. I have no idea how to maximize the terminal window and I don't think that is possible to do.
I'm stuck...
In short, I have no apparent way of editing the grub configuration with r94. The menu option at boot freezes, and the screen resolution is an issue in a terminal that I can't fix. I'm attempting to add the options=broadcom_wl bit and keep trying, but it can't be done as far as I can tell. The Broadcom driver seems to load even without the options=broadcom_wl added, but I can't get WiFi other than that one time way back with an earlier recovery version. As mentioned above, up until an hour or so ago, the machine somehow knew who I was from that one, fleeting connection to WiFi and a one-time login. That's gone now and I'm presented with the "Welcome to Chromebook Fast.Secure.Effortless." although I'm doubting the latter at the moment. "GET STARTED brings me to the "Connect to network" screen with "NEXT >" phantomed out until I can get connected.
dmesg reports that "Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [Features: PNLS ]" - this is without options=broadcom_wl added.
Nothing else looks particularly relevant in dmesg, but I can dig deeper if anyone has any ideas.
Has anyone been able to get a Macbook Air 6,2 (2012/13?) working with Brunch? If so, I'd be hugely gratefu if you could provide me with some clues on where to go from here. Perhaps I can try exactly what you tried (same recovery, same brunch version, same grub options, etc.).
Thanks in advance for your kind help.
Does the touchscreen (if your device has one) workGetting it to work
Boots flawlessly. rEFInd direct boot from image, without dual booting linux is also possible.
camera
Well... that seems to be a MacBook issue I assume. Works out of the box in ubuntu though.
wifi
You need to enable the broadcom option. This makes it work after boot. However putting the laptop to sleep (closing lid) and waking it up again breaks wifi completely. BT works all the time though 🤷 .
Doesn't reconnect to wifi. Settings show it as on but doesn't discover any networks. Toggling it on and off doesn't change that (as well as
rfkill).Same issue is not present on Ubuntu. Didn't investigate any further.