When the wifi driver disappears

(from your 2014ish macbook air with debian on it)

The debian website is surprisingly helpful if you want to install Debian on this machine. It’s a bit of a hassle because the wifi card won’t work out of the box so you go back and forth with a USB stick until you can get it to work. Fine.

Now the driver has stopped working or disappeared after an update so I have to retrace my steps from last year.

Need these packages to build the driver/module:

  linux-kbuild-$(uname -r)
  linux-headers-$(uname -r)_amd64.deb,
  linux-headers-$(uname -r)-common.deb

Install packages from .deb by

 sudo dpkg -i <your .deb file here>

Having installed linux headers it actually rebuilt the module for me.

Well actually

So apparently I might get away with just

sudo apt install linux-headers-amd64

and then it will update the headers when the rest of the packages update. Not sure how I got onto the track of installing versioned packages in the first place?

Backlinks:

• (202508281422) Bits of string: computers