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#1 2026-01-07 04:42:32
- Arthurmeade12
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- From: U.S.A
- Registered: 2022-10-18
- Posts: 50
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Trouble installing on 2014 Macbook without Wifi - no disk space
I was recently donated a 2014 Macbook Air, so naturally I wanted to install Arch on it.
This particular Macbook needs broadcom-wl-dkms for its wifi to work. I do not own a usb to ethernet adapter, so I downloaded broadcom-wl-dkms in .pkg.tar.zst format onto my usb so that I could then mount the usb and use `pacman -U` in the iso's live environment. I naturally also downloaded broadcom-wl-dkms's 9 dependencies and subdependencies that are not already on archiso's default package list: dkms, gc, gcc, guile, libisl, libmpc, linux-headers, make, and patch.
Here I ran into a hitch: my laptop only has 4gb of DDR3 RAM and pacman didn't have room to install all 10 packages on the iso (since the "filesystem" is actually all in RAM for the live environment). To circumvent this, I tried to make my own iso. However, the script `mkarchiso` needs pacman - and the other two computers I have are Fedora aarch64 and Debian aarch64, so I can't use pacman on those machines.
I noticed with `df` that there were several other filesystems in the environment like "cowtoram" that were decently big - can I shrink those somehow to make room for these packages? Is fstab where I'd do that? Alternatively, how do I build my own iso without an x86_64 linux computer? Will making my own iso solve the ram space (not disk space!) issue?
Thanks for any help.
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#2 2026-01-07 08:43:48
- seth
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- From: Don't DM me only for attention
- Registered: 2012-09-03
- Posts: 72,057
Re: Trouble installing on 2014 Macbook without Wifi - no disk space
I do not own a usb to ethernet adapter
Do you have a phone?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Tethering
Now you own a usb to ethernet adapter 
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