Wifi Under Fedora Linux on a MacBook Pro 15″ Retina

LMAX Exchange

Out of the box, Fedora 19 doesn’t have support for the broadcom wifi chip in the MacBook Pro 15″ Retina. There are quite a few complex instructions for adjusting firmware and compiling bits and bobs etc, but the easiest way to get it up and running on Fedora is using rpmfusion.

You can do it by downloading a bunch of rpms and stuffing around with USB drives, but its way easier if you setup network access first via either a thunderbolt ethernet adapter (make sure its plugged in before starting up as hotplugging thunderbolt doesn’t work under Linux), or via bluetooth.  The bluetooth connection can either be to a mobile phone sharing its data connection or if you have another Mac around, it can share its wifi network over bluetooth (turn on Internet Sharing in the Sharing settings panel).

Once you have network access, run a yum update so you have the latest packages from fedora. It didn’t work for me with the plain Fedora 19 install.

Then go to rpmfusion.org and install first the “RPM Fusion free for Fedora 19″ then the “RPM Fusion nonfree for Fedora 19″ RPMs.

Finally, run ‘sudo yum install broadcom-wl’.  After a reboot Linux should come back up with wifi working.

UPDATE (2014-01-13): I’ve found that each time a kernel upgrade comes through I’ve had to uninstall then reinstall broadcom-wl which is kind of annoying. This time round I’m experimenting with installing ‘kmod-wl’ which brings in broadcom-wl as a dependency but I’m hoping does better at tracking kernel updates.

Also worth noting that this approach continues to work with Fedora 20.

Adrian Sutton LMAX Exchange Staff Blogs   LMAX Exchange  

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