MacBook Air again in 2021

Previously installed Arch Linux on my wife’s old MacBook Air. Then just recently, due to the need of using Zoom Meeting on a device, I tried to re-use this MacBook Air again.

Sadly, Mac OS X 10.6.8 is not supported anymore. I cannot install latest Google Chrome, latest Firefox, or Zoom. The only solution is running Linux on it.

First of all, I have to update Arch Linux. However, the last update was in November 2019. Due to WiFi driver issue (slow, damn slow!), I just remove all unnecessary packages, such as LibreOffice, Wine, SMPlayer, Audacious, etc, and do the upgrade according to this forum post.

There are two main problems in MacBook Air when running Arch Linux: (1) Wi-Fi and (2) graphic card.

For WiFi, at the end, I blacklist bcma. It is damn slow. For Internet connection, I just solve it by using Android phone USB tethering. That’s far more better than WiFi download speed, which is around 200 kilobytes per second.

The second problem is nvidia-380xx-dkms driver. Since it is old machine, I use linux-lts kernel, which can work smoothly with nvidia-380xx-dkms. However, I am not sure what’s the reason, if running glxgears, the OpenGL fails to work. OpenGL is required for Zoom to run. Luckily, I found that if I restart lightdm, then OpenGL will be able to work, so does Zoom.