Getting Wi-Fi working on a 2015 MacBook Air with Ubuntu 26.04

I installed Ubuntu 26.04 on my early 2015 13” MacBook Air. Getting Wi-Fi working took a bit of fiddling, so I’m writing down what worked before I forget.

The laptop has a Broadcom BCM4360 wireless card. Ubuntu could see the hardware, but there was no Wi-Fi interface available.

Which driver has the card?

The useful starting point was lspci:

lspci -nn | grep -i broadcom
lspci -k | grep -A4 -i network

Initially, the driver information showed:

Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: bcma, wl

Later, it showed the available modules without a driver in use:

Kernel modules: bcma, wl

Seeing wl listed under “Kernel modules” doesn’t mean it’s actually driving the card. That was a useful distinction while figuring out what was going on.

The configuration that worked used the proprietary Broadcom STA driver, wl.

Getting enough internet to fix the internet

First, I needed a temporary connection to install the packages. iPhone USB tethering or Ethernet gets around the missing Wi-Fi.

I enabled the restricted repository and refreshed the package lists:

sudo add-apt-repository -y restricted
sudo apt update

Then removed the b43 firmware packages:

sudo apt purge -y b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer

And installed the STA driver:

sudo apt install -y broadcom-sta-dkms

Blacklisting the other modules

I also explicitly blacklisted b43 and bcma:

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom.conf
blacklist b43
blacklist bcma
EOF

Removing the firmware packages doesn’t remove these kernel modules, so the purge and blacklist do different jobs.

The STA package may already provide equivalent blacklist rules. I didn’t test whether my extra file was necessary; this is the sequence I used to get the machine working.

Then I rebuilt the initramfs and rebooted:

sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo reboot

After that, Wi-Fi appeared and worked. It also kept working through subsequent reboots.

Checking the result

These commands were useful while sorting it out:

# Which driver is using the wireless card?
lspci -k | grep -A4 -i network

# Which Broadcom modules are loaded?
lsmod | grep -E 'wl|bcma|b43'

# Does NetworkManager have a Wi-Fi device?
nmcli device

Look for wl as the driver in use and a wireless device in NetworkManager. A module appearing in the list of possible drivers isn’t enough.

Do it again after installing

I needed the fix in the live installer as well as the installed system.

Getting Wi-Fi working in the live session let me continue with the installation, but those changes didn’t carry over. I repeated the setup after booting into the installed copy of Ubuntu.

This worked on my BCM4360-equipped MacBook Air. If you’re trying it on another Mac, check the actual wireless chipset first—different models use different cards.

For mine, lspci was the useful starting point: Ubuntu could see the card, and checking which driver had claimed it gave me something concrete to investigate.