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Wi-Fi (Broadcom BCM4331) for an old iMac (iMac13,1) in 2026

Nick Bettison — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:36:00 +0000

My Christmas project this year was to make my old 2012 iMac work; previously I have used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to keep MacOS going but that was become less useable -- Enter Linux! This note is specifically geared towards OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but is hopefully helpful for anyone trying similar with any other distro.

TLDR;

Install b43-fwcutter
Download broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.tar.bz2
sudo b43-fwcutter -w /usr/lib/firmware broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.wl_apsta.o
Reboot & Hope!

Long form

Booting from the tumbleweed ISO/USB worked well, obviously the bluetooth keyboard/mouse don't work, but bluetooth is detected and will work later. Wi-Fi is not detected at all, an Ethernet cable was required to get networking up. Upon completing the install, I started to investigate how to fix Wi-Fi. On Tumbleweed, the pullin-bcm43xx-firmware package provides /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware however, even tho it "runs", it has an error and Wi-Fi still doesn't work and the reason is because www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/ no longer exists.

Browsing the internet archive, I found a working snapshot for 8th July 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240708013600/http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/

Steps:

Download broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.tar.bz2
If it's not installed, you'll need b43-fwcutter, so sudo zypper install b43-fwcutter.
Unpack the archive: tar -xjf broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.tar.bz2
Install the driver: sudo b43-fwcutter -w /usr/lib/firmware broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.wl_apsta.o
Reboot ... there's probably a way to avoid the reboot by restating Network Manager, but whatever!

After the reboot, you should see the WLAN adapter available.

Closing thoughts.

I am hosting a copy of the driver here, incase the archive goes down: www.linickx.com/files/2026/01/broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.tar.bz2. For me, the driver only seems to be working on 2.4Ghz, even tho' the BCM4331 support 5Ghz 802.11a 🤷🏻‍♂️ ... and performance seems to be a poor 5Mb/s. But for now, I'm on with this as my plan is to use the iMac as a kinda distraction free SSH or Writing terminal; perhaps I can fix that later and update here.

If anyone knows how to get the nVidia driver working please hit me up as I'm having to manually tweak the screen brightness with each reboot.

Keebio IRIS layout & printout for MacOS

Nick Bettison — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 16:29:00 +0100

I spent 3 hours on this so you don't have too, well many credits goes to this guy, Ben Williamson for publishing his layout which I modified.

The nice people at Keeb.io ship their IRIS keyboards with a handy print out that shows all the default keys & layers, which is American. Out of the box, I needed to make some changes such as moving |, I also wanted the OSX Mission Control buttons, and then I moved Enter because I really don't understand the default thumb assignment, after 5 minutes tinkering I realised I no longer knew where a bunch of keys were and the print out wasn't helping.

This is my solution:

👉🏻 keeb-io-iris.use-via-layout.json - Load this into usevia.app
👉🏻 keeb-io-iris.print-layout.json - Load this into www.keyboard-layout-editor.com or click here to load this gist.

From there you can either print out the graphic and work, or make your customisations!

Apple Magic Mouse - Fixing Windows 10 scrolling

Nick Bettison — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 13:54:00 +0000

If you're a fan of Apple's Magic Mouse you can use it on Windows, however after pairing via Blue Tooth (the code is 0 0 0 0) you'll find that the touch scrolling doesn't work.

It's easily fixed however,

Download Boot Camp Support Software and unzip, in my case that was unzipping BootCamp5.1.5621.zip.
Open the folder \BootCamp5.1.5621\BootCamp\Drivers\Apple\ and install AppleWirelessMouse64.exe.
Switch the mouse off & on and you're done.

Happy Scrolling!

OSX: How to install the Microsoft Fonts

Nick Bettison — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 19:50:00 +0100

I've recently had to rebuild my laptop and needed to setup M$ fonts for work. The top hit for installing fonts is a stack exchange thread pointing to a 3rd Party download, given that I knew that office came with the fonts, I just needed to figure where they were.

Assuming you don't have MS office installed, here's a quick 4 step install....

-- If you do have office, start at 3

Install Cask
Install Microsoft Office brew cask install microsoft-office
Make a directory: mkdir ~/Library/Fonts/Microsoft
Copy the fonts: cp -av /Applications/Microsoft\ Word.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts/* ~/Library/Fonts/Microsoft/

Enjoy!

OSX Automator and Python - for mac address conversion

nick — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 18:24:00 +0100

Recently I wrote a python script for converting mac addresses (which you can download from github) and the reason I wrote it is because I receive emails like this...

The background is, I'm working on an 802.1x project, I need to find the printer, the quickest solution in this case is to look in the ARP cache of the router/switch on site.

The irritant is that in the email the MAC is in EUI format, but routers/switches are in Cisco's. To Further irritate, Cisco ISE and ACS use EUI format so if someone sends you a MAC address from a switch or their windows machine then you need to convert it, I've spent a lot of time replacing dots and dashes :D

Today, I realised that I could use Apple's Automator to grab text from somewhere... I could then parse it through my python scripts and have the results in my clip board... ready for pasting!

Below is my automator workflow

In the python field you can't see the full text... paste in this...

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys

addr=str(sys.argv[1])

if "." in addr:
    delimiter = "."
elif ":" in addr:
    delimiter = ":"
elif "-" in addr:
    delimiter = "-"

# Eliminate the delimiter
m = addr.replace(delimiter, "")

# Normalise Case
m = m.lower()
u = m.upper()

eui= ":".join(["%s%s" % (m[i], m[i+1]) for i in range(0,12,2)])

print eui

If you've having issues creating a new automator service from the screenshot I have uploaded my Convert to EUI MAC.workflow save it to ~/Library/Services

Once you're all setup, you'll be able to right click any mac address and convert it. I've also created a Convert to Cisco MAC.workflow if you need it in router/switch format.

OS X: Sync'ing keychains in the iCloud

nick — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:20:00 +0100

Keychains hold passwords, certificates and general secret stuff - only do this if you understand the Apple will have access to this.... well assuming they can crack your keychain password (which they probably can).

Synchronising a keychain across macs could be useful, for example, having a dedicated keychain for WiFi credentials.

I stumbled across this link (dated Nov 2011) and found that this still works!

The ~Library/Mobile Documents/ folder is pushed to all iCloud enabled computers, so I have created a new folder, and copied my WiFi keychain into it:

#!/bin/bash
$ mkdir ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~linickx~icloud
$ cp ~/Library/Keychains/wifi.keychain ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~linickx~icloud/

If you only have one keychain login.keychain, consider splitting out the really secret stuff and only sync'ing the stuff you want to share with apple.

Now open "Keychain Access", delete the original keychain and add/open the iCloud copy. On any other Mac, add/open the iCloud keychain. Once complete, any change to the keychain will be pushed to all Macs, simplifying password changes :)

I'm also using this to sync dotfiles!

You could use dropbox for this, one reason to use dropbox is that iCloud sync seems to be a bit hit n miss; however Dropbox already have enough of my secrets, I'm not suggesting that iCloud is more secure, it's just better to have many baskets.

FOOTNOTE: If your mobile documents folder isn't sync'ing, see this post by SteveX.

3rd Generation iPod Shuffle Skipping

nick — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:04:00 +0100

My daughters new iPod Shuffle was skipping tracks after only playing the first 5 to 20 seconds. After a load of googling and trial and error I worked out that my being cleaver approach of lowing the track bit rate to squeeze more tracks in was the mistake... you need to ensure that all files are at least 128k.

Is Mac the Anti-Linux or the Answer?

nick — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:40:00 +0100

So, I've been toying with the idea of buying a mac. Using WindowsXP is a no go for me, we're just not friends; work haven't yet rolled out Vista. I love linux, have been using it for years, and have upset many an I.T department by partitioning their loving-crafted standard Windows Build with my favourite flavour of linux but I'm getting the same old Gripes....

Hardware-Compatibility: Now don't get me wrong, fedora has installed and pretty-much worked out of the box for years, but it's the little niggles that get you, my hp nc6320 (company issued) has an intel wireless card, and quite frankly the fedora support is unreliable; if it's not issues where by I can't connect to hidden ssids, I can't run leap, and even my broadcasted home wpa network can be a bit flakey (my n800 & ps3 use it fine so it's definitely a laptop issue).... top this off with the odd issue with graphics cards, very little support for mobile broadband, fingerpint authentication and it's enough to drive anyone mad!

Work-Compatibility: Like most UK companies EVERYTHING has a windows focus, even down to the linux web-managed-appliances which have to be ie7 compatible. Open-office is great, but I can't run the macro's written by our marketing department (which format things) and even if I do manually make it look right the conversion to MS-Word is a bit "iffy". Evolutions exchange-connector works most of the time, but archiving my mailbox from outlook screws it, changing my password (due to expiry) cause mail-notification to freak-out, and the built-in html formatting engine doesn't set a font so if I reply to an HTML e-mail, all my text is in the nasty times roman.. and just another couple of points since I'm in full rant, share-point support in firefox! and what is everyone's obsession is MSN and office communicator, what's wrong with skype or google talk both of which have platform independent solutions. (Yes pidgin supports MSN, but it's not feature complete)

So is a mac the answer? Those I've known an met whom own macs (and in the UK, unless you're in media they're few and far between) have all said "everything just works"... oh how I've longed for that... and the UI is nice, so all the compiz prettyness that I've gotten used to is kinda there. I've done some research, there's an offical office for mac, which support exchange, there's a communicator for LCS which includes msn support, there's certianly more off the shelf software that supports mac than linux!

But is it out of the frying pan into the fire? Let's look at why XP doesn't work for me, 1stly the interface, it makes me feel unconfortable, I've tried themeing it, but that just covers up the bad colour scheme, themes ocasionally slow your machine down, some apps don't accept the theme engine, and after-all you're just painting a bad egg so even if it is easier on the eye the problems sill exist! All this aside, Vista is supposed to address the usability and eye-candy issues, so maybe I should be using that? So user-interfaces could be considered a shallow reason to choose your OS, and to be honest although how I interact with the PC is important (since it's what I do for a living) it's not what attracted me to linux in the 1st place. FREE, yes FREE is what attracts most of us to linux, windows licencing and cost is a nightmare, winzip & winrar are examples of stuff you expect to have as part of the OS, yes XP can open .zips but what about .tgz? ... OK lets look at terminal emulation or ssh, finding a good one can be a problem putty is great but it's a bit dis-jointed, the sftp function isn't built into explorer tab's is an extra add-on... what about the stuff you occasionaly use, so I re-size the odd image or convert .jpg to .png should I be paying for a tool I only use once a month, if I should, can I afford it?

The investment in a mac is not a small one, so my question is, can I get the best of both worlds? Can I buy the software I need, and download open-source alternative easily for the rest? Can I mix the "it just works" with the tech-tinkering that I'm used to? After purchasing a macbook, ms office for mac, vmware-fusion (I have vm-ware server on linux to run visio, I know this will be no-different on a mac) and topped that off with a backup-solution (work pay to backup windows, rsync does the job for linux) I'm going to have spent best part of £1,500... oh yeah this includes a special VGA cable so I can plug into a projector... apple are known for tying users in tightly, will that become my new bug-bear? which leads me to....

Is Mac the Anti-Linux?
Apple insist that their OS runs only on their hardware, the ipod only works with their software (itunes) and plays their music format, you need special cables to plug your laptop into a standard monitor/projector, the iphone only works with apples chosen provider... is all this restriction going to make things worse? Linux is about freedom, machine architectures range from pda's to playstations, the interface that you use can easily be changed, nearly everything is open and if I were a programmer I could fix, change, anything I liked.... would I be jumping from complete democratic freedom to a dictatorship?

So there we have it, a million questions I just don't know the answer to! I do know I don't have a grand kicking about, so this won't be something I tackle lightly, if I do I then have the politics at work to address, no booting into linux isn't supported by IT, but the laptop is a standard-same-as-everyone-else-thingy if I bring in a shiny new apple it's going to attract attention.... which will certainly upset someone! The windows of change are bring more macs to the UK, but is it just a fad? More thought is definitely needed, I just hope I can bring myself to a decision soon :)