Installation of Linux Mint 20.3

You can't say that there's no technological excitement in my life. I finally had to abandon the use of Ubuntu on my 2013 MacBook Pro. The keyboard, trackpad and mouse freezes were becoming too frequent and numerous reboots were required to activate these devices. Finally no amount of rebooting could activate them and so I turned to Linux Mint.

The installation went smoothly enough but the boot up process was, and continues to be, interrupted by a series of error messages. That is a minor irritation but far worse was to come. I discovered that the OS didn't recognise the WiFi adapter in the laptop. So, for the moment, no WiFi but thankfully I have an Ethernet connection. I had an old TP-LINK WiFi dongle that must be at least a decade old and I tried that out but no luck. Perhaps a can buy a more up-to-date dongle that works. This is a matter for deeper investigation but for the moment, as long as the keyboard, mouse and trackpad don't freeze up on me, I'll be happy.

 

 

My initial attempt to install the Chrome browser failed but then I was reminded that flatpak is built into Linux Mint and, by using that, the installation of the Chrome browser and also Calibre was straight forward. So far, after a couple of days of using Linux Mint, I've had no problems and I hope things stay that way.

I've put out a request for help on the Linux Mint Forums and hopefully help will be forthcoming. So far 20 views but no comments. However, it's been up less than an hour. 

I'll add an addendum if help arrives.

ADDENDUM

... and help did arrive! A user called sleeper12 offered two suggestions. The first was:

inxi -Fxxxrz && rfkill list && iwconfig && mokutil --sb-state 

This had no effect but the second suggestion did the trick:

sudo modprobe -r wl && sudo modprobe wl && sudo systemctl restart network-manager.service 

This is great news and my laptop is now fully functional, apart from the webcam that I assume is still not working. I should ask for help with that on the forums as well.