I have been using Fedora Kinoite on my MacBook Air (6,2) for some time now and everything was working fine until the upgrade to Fedora 40. Now my Broadcom wireless adapter (BCM4360) no longer works even though nothing has changed on my machine with respect to packages installed. I even did a clean reinstall including the broadcom-wl driver and still have the issue. Has anyone else experienced this and is there a fix you can recommend? Thank you in advance.
Please tell us your Apple model; whether you have alternate network access such as a wired connection, wifi dongle, or hub with networking; and whether you are comfortable using command-line tools including sudo or doas. If you don’t have alternative internet access, I do recommend getting a USB wifi dongle as it can often be useful whenever the Broadcom wifi isn’t working, but note that some tiny dongles are antenna-challenged and may not connect to access points that were working with Apple wifi.
Many of us have problems with 6.10 kernels and Apple systems using Broadcom. In my case, ip ad shows “DISABLED” for the wifi (wl...) device and journalctl --no-hostname -b -g wifi |cat has only 2 lines:
% journalctl --no-hostname -b -g wifi |head -2
Aug 15 08:34:59 NetworkManager[1239]: <info> [1723721699.0583] Read config: /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf (lib: 20-connectivity-fedora.conf, 22-wifi-mac-addr.conf, 90-broadcom-wl.conf)
Aug 15 08:34:59 NetworkManager[1239]: <info> [1723721699.0778] Loaded device plugin: NMWifiFactory (/usr/lib64/NetworkManager/1.46.2-1.fc40/libnm-device-plugin-wifi.so)
There are several way to enable it without needing network access.
Here is the simplest I have seen: from ip ad use the “device name” that begins with wl, then try sudo iw <device name> scan which either gives an error or enables the device and provides copious details of nearby access points. After running this, you should see additional lines like:
Aug 16 09:39:24 NetworkManager[1239]: <info> [1723811964.6959] device (wlp3s0): Activation: (wifi) access point 'XXX' has security, but secrets are required.
Aug 16 09:39:24 NetworkManager[1239]: <info> [1723811964.6996] device (wlp3s0): Activation: (wifi) connection 'XXXX' has security, and secrets exist. No new secrets needed.
Aug 16 09:39:24 NetworkManager[1239]: <info> [1723811964.8846] device (wlp3s0): Activation: (wifi) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) successful. Connected to wireless network "XXXX"
One of my non-apple systems appears to have lost sight of the wifi interface so I can’t use this method. This may be because I have disabled network booting or some side effect of using a USBC hub with network ports. These problems may be related to efforts to improve power management in Linux (one of the checklist items that block wider use of Linux in large enterprises trying to move off Windows and have limited power per seat allocations in cubicle farms).
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Thank you for the reply George. The particular machine involved is a MacBook Air and I’m pretty comfortable with the terminal. In fact I was able to fix the issue by downloading and installing what I presume to be a newer version of the driver and after I rebooted I could see my wireless networks again and make use of my adapter.