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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;

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:

  1. Download broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.tar.bz2
  2. If it's not installed, you'll need b43-fwcutter, so sudo zypper install b43-fwcutter.
  3. Unpack the archive: tar -xjf broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.tar.bz2
  4. Install the driver: sudo b43-fwcutter -w /usr/lib/firmware broadcom-wl-6.30.163.46.wl_apsta.o
  5. 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.

 

 
Nick Bettison ©