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There is a recurrent and very much difficult to solve instability of the wifi connection on the 2008 MacBook Air due to the chipset, causing various trouble on Ubuntu ranging from

  • connection to Wifi but no connectivity
  • keyboard and mouse lacking
  • irq conflicts

What happened is that each time the connection seems to work again, but after some time there is a connection, but no internet, and the compatibility issue is such that the previous found solutions don't work anymore!

I'll propose here a workaround supplying a stable solution to the problem.

Lurch
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1 Answers1

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After struggling a lot, knowing there are solutions around, that I found in Linux Mint forums, but not giving a stable solution for the problem.

I refer to this thread, however the solution is not entirely solved there. How to get internal wifi working on MacBook Air 1,1 on Ubuntu Mate 16.04?

"To resolve this issue you must re-install Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, etc.

Begin the reinstallation process and where you select "Installation Type" select "Something Else" create a 500MB partition and select "reverse bios" instead of "efi"

To the best of my knowledge, problem seems to be that "Secure Boot" AKA "efi" only allows for supported hardware and the required b43 driver apparently isn't supported hardware." Source: here

Then, just install the b43-installer from driver manager.

If you prefer an out of the box solution, look here

Have fun! The MacBook Air 1,1 is a great machine under linux, it would have been a pity not being able to use it normally, and ubuntu gives it after all a well-deserved life extension!

Lurch
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