Arch Linux

jfabernathy

Member

From: North Carolina

Registered: 2019-01-03

Posts: 123

broadcom 4331 wifi - making it stable

I have a ~2011 Macbook Pro (Core i5 2nd gen) that Apple no longer supports. So I thought it would be a good candidate for Archlinux.

The only piece of hardware not supported out of the box was the WiFi using the BCM4331 chip.

I fixed that by, during the 'archinstall' script, adding additional packages of:

base-devel git broadcom-wl-dkms

However, the wifi was unstable and sometimes would not connect to known good AP/routes essids.

I found this could be fixed by adding some lines to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

[device]
wifi.scan-rand-mac-address=no

I have not seen that suggestion on any Archlinux Broadcom wiki, but got the suggestion from the Manjaro forum.
Turns out this was the same edit that Kubuntu made when I did a test install on the same hardware.

Hope this helps someone else.