Fedora doesn't recognise wifi network card on MacBook Pro 2013 15in Retina

Ask Fedora
,
1

Hi all,

I am really keen to use Fedora on a couple of older machines I have, including a MacBook Pro 2013 15" Retina. However, when I installed Fedora 41, Settings reports that a wifi card was not found. I dug out a USB-A to Ethernet dongle and connected via cable to my router, and Settings shows the network is connected, but I can’t access the Internet. I’m having déjà vu because I ran into the same problem installing Fedora 41 on a Lenovo m910q.

I get Internet access for about 20s at a time followed by a long period where I can’t load pages and pinging 8.8.8.8 times out. My guess is that something in the network stack is crashing and then taking a really long time or multiple attempts to reload.

I’m wondering if anyone else has had this problem and how you fixed it?

Many thanks,
Daniel

2

Welcome to the Forums Daniel.

If you have the proper driver on your two machines mentioned, and it connects, it should work.

With the Macbook, maybe the driver is not installed? Run

Inxi -Nzxx

to find your network controllers, and see if you need to install a driver.

I assume that you can connect to your Wifi router with other devices, your phone or other computers?

3

I believe the macbook uses a broadcom wifi adapter.
If you enable the rpmfusion free and nonfree repos as shown here then you should be able to install the broadcom-wl drivers using dnf. That should enable your wifi after a reboot.

Fedora does not provide the broadcom drivers since they are proprietary.

4

Hi @computersavvy and @theprogram, thank you so much — that sounds likely to be the problem! I’ll give these suggestions a go and report back.