Debian on a 2010 MacBook Air 13"

Mar 20, 2026 Updated for Debian 13

Specs

MacBook Air 13" (Late 2010)
Model A1369 EveryMac.com
Intel “Core 2 Duo” (SL9400)
Memory: 2GB (kinda)
nVidia GeForce 320M (256MB shared)
Storage: 256GB

Notes

This work was done with Debian 13
The netboot installer does not recognize the wifi card. A USB ethernet adapter is needed.
To boot the installer from a thumb drive hold down the option key while powering up.
Memory is very tight on this machine, use the most lightweight desktop if possible. LXDE worked great for me instead of Gnome.

Keep /tmp out of memory

Debian 13 is mounting /tmp into memory using tmpfs. To disable this:

systemctl mask tmp.mount

Grub Boot Screen

The graphical version of the grub boot screen does not work. It needs to be disabled

Edit /etc/default/grub
Uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console
Run update-grub
Reboot

Networking

For the system to recognize the wifi card, special firmware is needed.

Add ‘nonfree’ to your apt configuration before using these commands

apt-get update
apt-get install broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-dkms linux-headers-`uname -r`
modprobe wl

nVidia Drivers

The nVidia drivers are long since out of date and unsupported. The nouveau drivers just work out of the box. I have not seen an issue with this.

If you read dmesg, there are a lot of firmware missing errors for the nouveau driver. There is a great write up over at freedesktop.org which goes over the steps on how to extract and install the firmware.

Brightness

Edit GRUB config

Edit */etc/default/grub *
Append acpi_backlight=native to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
Run update-grub
Reboot

Change brightness

The direct brightness controls can be found in
/sys/class/backlight/nv_backlight/brightness

Web browser hardware acceleration

Chromium

To check if hardware acceleration is enabled: chrome://gpu
To turn on hardware acceleration enable this flag: chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blocklist and restart your browser.

Firefox

In settings uncheck “Use recommended performance settings”.

Touchpad Config

Thanks to Int3ractive for their amazing work on finding these config options.

Install the Multitouch X input driver

apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-mtrack

Add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "InputClass"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Identifier      "Touchpads"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver          "mtrack"
        # The faster you move, the more distance pointer will travel, using "polynomial" profile
        Option          "AccelerationProfile" "2"
        # Tweak cursor movement speed with this
        Option          "Sensitivity" "0.25"
        # Pressure at which a finger is detected as a touch
        Option          "FingerHigh" "5"
        # Pressure at which a finger is detected as a release
        Option          "FingerLow" "5"
        # I often use thumb to press down the physical button, so let's not ignore it
        Option          "IgnoreThumb" "false"
        Option          "ThumbRatio" "70"
        Option          "ThumbSize" "25"
        # Ignore palm, with palm takes up to 30% of your touch pad
        Option          "IgnorePalm" "true"
        Option          "PalmSize" "30"
        # Trigger mouse button when tap: 1 finger - left click, 2 finger - right click, 3 - middle click
        Option          "TapButton1" "1"
        Option          "TapButton2" "3"
        Option          "TapButton3" "2"
        Option          "TapButton4" "0"
        Option          "ClickTime" "25"
        # Disable tap-to-drag, we're using three finger drag instead
        Option          "TapDragEnable" "true"
        # While touching the touch pad with # fingers, press the touchpad physical click button
        Option          "ClickFinger1" "1"
        Option          "ClickFinger2" "3"
        Option          "ClickFinger3" "2"
        Option          "ButtonMoveEmulate" "false"
        Option          "ButtonIntegrated" "true"
        # The momentum after scroll fingers released
        Option          "ScrollCoastDuration" "300"
        Option          "ScrollCoastEnableSpeed" ".1"
        # Natural scrolling with two fingers
        Option          "ScrollSmooth" "true"
        Option          "ScrollUpButton" "5"
        Option          "ScrollDownButton" "4"
        Option          "ScrollLeftButton" "7"
        Option          "ScrollRightButton" "6"
        # Tweak scroll sensitivity with ScrollDistance, don't touch ScrollSensitivity
        Option          "ScrollDistance" "250"
        Option          "ScrollClickTime" "10"
        # Three finger drag
        Option          "SwipeDistance" "1"
        Option          "SwipeLeftButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeRightButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeUpButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeDownButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeClickTime" "0"
        Option          "SwipeSensitivity" "1500"
        # Four finger swipe, 8 & 9 are for browsers navigating back and forth respectively
        Option          "Swipe4LeftButton" "9"
        Option          "Swipe4RightButton" "8"
        # Mouse button >= 10 are not used by Xorg, so we'll map them with xbindkeys and xdotool later
        Option          "Swipe4UpButton" "11"
        Option          "Swipe4DownButton" "10"
        # Mouse buttons triggered by 2-finger pinching gesture
        Option          "ScaleDistance" "300"
        Option          "ScaleUpButton" "12"
        Option          "ScaleDownButton" "13"
        # Mouse buttons trigger by 2-finger rotating gesture, disabled to enhance the pinch gesture
        Option          "RotateLeftButton" "0"
        Option          "RotateRightButton" "0"
EndSection

Hardware Updates

WIFI/Bluetooth 2.4Ghz -> Dual band (2.4/5Ghz)

The original WIFI card 802.11N BCM943224PCIEBT2 supported IEEE 802.11n (802.11a/b/g compatible). This basically is a single band 2.4Ghz wifi card.

After reading some blog posts the 802.11Ac BCM94360CS2 from A1466 can act as a replacement.

This is mostly true, it does fit the slot and is functional. There are some issues that can be worked around. I won’t go into crazy detail but below are some tips:

The card is longer and the retaining screw doesn’t line up. Not a huge deal, the edge connector does a decent job holding everything in place.
Because the card is longer the 2 antenna wires will not reach. You need to remove/unsolder the bracket that holds the antenna wire in the corner of the case. Also one of the screws holding the bracket needed to stay out to have enough clearance for the cover. This should give you just enough reach to connect the antennas. The longer antenna wire can be routed under the card through the retaining notch.

Replacemnt SSD

Turns out there is a ton of adapters out there. I picked the M.2 NGFF SSD to A1369 A1370 Adapter from Amazon.

It’s pretty straight forward, remove the old drive, load your SSD into the adapter and then mount the whole thing in to the computer.

Created: 2024-08-17

Modified: 2026-03-22