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A friend handed me an old unwanted Macbook Pro and said "Have fun with it", so I decided to run it with Ubuntu. Before doing an actual installation, I tried it with a non-persistent USB stick. Everything worked fine except for wi-fi, which doesn't even show up in settings. The computer works fine with a wired connection to the router. When I start the computer with the Mac OS, wi-fi works fine.

Is there any reason to believe that the situation would be different if I did a full installation of Ubuntu?

Ancient
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2 Answers2

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Please reboot with the Ubuntu USB stick again. While booted into Ubuntu, open a terminal and run:

lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A3

If the wireless device is, as we suspect, a Broadcom, then check here: Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers If your device is listed, then it will be a trivial task to install the correct driver after installation.

It is not advisable to use the Additional Drivers mechanism, as it is known to sometimes install the wrong driver. Please only rely on the link above.

chili555
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I had this problem with my old iMac. I instead installed Ubuntu Budgie (a very Mac-like distro), which allowed me to easily download extra software during its install (which may be more important for old Mac hardware), and that cured my WiFi problem.

TIP … when installing Ubuntu-Budgie, uncheck the “Require my password to login” box (unless you enjoy password Hell).

Ken Dine
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