The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Getting rEFInd
by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
12/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.5.0
I'm a technical writer and consultant specializing in Linux technologies. This Web page is provided free of charge and with no annoying outside ads; however, I did take time to prepare it, and Web hosting does cost money. If you find this Web page useful, please consider making a small donation to help keep this site up and running. Thanks!
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This page is part of the documentation for the rEFInd boot manager. If a Web search has brought you here, you may want to start at the main page.
Note: I consider rEFInd to be beta-quality software! I'm discovering bugs (old and new) and fixing them every few days. That said, rEFInd is a usable program in its current form on many systems. If you have problems, feel free to drop me a line.
Getting rEFInd from Sourceforge
You can find the rEFInd source code and binary packages at its SourceForge page. Note that rEFInd is OS-independent—it runs before the OS, so you download the same binary package for any OS. You can obtain rEFInd in four different forms:
- A
source code zip file—This is useful if you want to
compile the software locally. Note that I use Linux with the TianoCore EFI
Development Kit 2 (EDK2) to build my binaries (below), although the
GNU-EFI
development tools are also supported. rEFIt used an Intel/Microsoft
toolchain. Backporting rEFInd to that toolchain is theoretically
possible, but I've not attempted it.
- A
binary zip file—Download this if you want to install
rEFInd and/or its filesystem drivers on an x86 or x86-64
computer and have no need to test rEFInd first by booting it on an
optical disc. This zip file package includes both x86 (aka IA32)
and x86-64 (aka x64, AMD64, or EM64T) versions of rEFInd.
Which you install depends on your architecture, as described on the Installing rEFInd page.
- A
CD-R image file—This download contains the same files as
the binary zip file, but you can burn it to a CD-R to test rEFInd
(and its filesystem drivers) without installing it first. (It boots on
UEFI PCs, but fails on some older Macs.) If you like it, you can then
copy the files from the CD-R to your hard disk. The files are named in
such a way that the disc should boot on either 64-bit (x86-64)
or 32-bit (x86) EFI computers. I've included an open source EFI
shell program on this disc that's not included in the binary zip file,
so that you can access an EFI shell from a bootable disc even if you
don't have an EFI shell available from your regular hard disk. This can
be an extremely valuable diagnostic tool if you know how to use an EFI
shell.
- Source code via
git—If you want to peruse the source code in your Web
browser or get the very latest version (including pre-release bug fixes
and updates), you can use the Sourceforge git repository. This access
method is most useful to programmers, or at least to those who are
familiar with programming tools. Note that if you need to ask "what's
git?", this is probably not the best way for you to obtain rEFInd.
If you're using a platform other than x86 or x86-64, you can give rEFInd a try; however, you'll need to build it from source code yourself or track down a binary from another source. (Perhaps by the time you read this it will be included in Linux distributions built for unusual CPUs.)
To extract the files from the zip file images I've provided, you'll need a tool such as unzip, which is included with Linux and Mac OS X. Numerous Windows utilities also support this format, such as PKZIP and 7-Zip.
You should be able to create a bootable USB flash drive from either the binary zip file or the CD-R image file; just treat the flash drive as if it were a hard disk and install rEFInd as described on the installation page. Using the fallback boot loader name of EFI/boot/bootx64.efi is likely to be the most useful way to install rEFInd to a removable medium.
Getting rEFInd from Your OS's Repositories
I know of a small number of pre-packaged versions of rEFInd, either in official OS repositories or in ancillary repositories:
- Arch Linux—You can obtain rEFInd from the Arch
repositories, in both a stable version (the refind-efi package
installable via pacman) and an experimental release built from
rEFInd's git repository in the Arch User Repository (AUR), under the
name refind-efi-git. The git release is likely to include
pre-release bug fixes and new features, but those features may be
poorly tested or undocumented. The last I checked, both builds used the
Tianocore toolkit, and so support booting BIOS/legacy boot loaders on
UEFI-based PCs.
- The Nix Packages
collection—This site creates packages for a number of
OSes using its own packaging system.
- OpenSUSE
Build Service (OBS)—This site holds a binary x86-64 build
of rEFInd that should install on any RPM-based distribution. It doesn't
completely set up rEFInd, though; it just places the rEFInd files in
the /usr/share/refind directory, and a copy of
install.sh as /usr/sbin/refind_install.
Unfortunately, the script makes assumptions about the locations of
files and so is useless when files are moved around in this way. Thus,
you'll need to install manually after installing this RPM, so you might
as well download the rEFInd binary .zip file from Sourceforge
instead.
To the best of my knowledge, no other Linux distribution yet includes rEFInd in its repositories. That's likely to change in time. If you hear of rEFInd being included in an OS's official package set, feel free to drop me a line.
copyright © 2012 by Roderick W. Smith
This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.
If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at rodsmith@rodsbooks.com. Thanks.
Go to the main rEFInd page
Learn how to install rEFInd
Return to my main Web page.