T2 MacBook Installation

Installation

General Information

CachyOS provides out of the box support for the T2 MacBook. The required kernel patches are shipped in all the kernels provided by CachyOS.

WiFi connection is not available out of the box because it is a closed source firmware, which CachyOS is not allowed to redistribute. The installation will only work with a LAN connection. WiFi support can be set-up after the installation. See installation of the firmware

Proceeding with Installation

Follow the instructions in Installation Prepare on how to download the ISO and create a bootable USB drive.

You need to follow additional steps to prepare a T2 MacBook for installing Linux such as partitioning your disk using macOS and disabling secure boot. You can follow the t2linux Preinstall guide for instructions.

Refer to Installation on Root after creating a bootable USB drive. CachyOS applies necessary boot parameters and configurations to the user’s T2 MacBook with CachyOS Hardware Detection.

Installation of the Firmware

The firmware can be downloaded and fetched from another mirror, which is not hosted by CachyOS.

Run the following commands after booting into the installed system:

1. Fetch firmware package using one of the following utils:

   using curl

   curl https://mirror.funami.tech/arch-mact2/os/x86_64/apple-bcm-firmware-14.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst -o apple-bcm-firmware-14.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

   using wget

   wget https://mirror.funami.tech/arch-mact2/os/x86_64/apple-bcm-firmware-14.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

   If wget is unavailable, install it with sudo pacman -S wget

2. Install firmware package

   sudo pacman -U apple-bcm-firmware-14.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

After that modprobe the firmware and reload the wifi driver:

sudo modprobe -r brcmfmac_wcc
sudo modprobe -r brcmfmac
sudo modprobe brcmfmac

The firmware can also be extracted from an ISPW file, see the t2linux wiki page