The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Revisions
by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
Last Web page update: 4/14/2012
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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.
The following summarizes changes in rEFInd's public releases:
- 0.2.6 (4/14/2012)—This version provides one bug fix and one new feature. The bug was introduced in version 0.2.5 and prevents rEFInd from identifying a Linux initial RAM disk file on some (but not all) EFI implementations. The new feature is the volume stanza token, which enables you to manually load a boot program from a filesystem other than the one from which rEFInd launched. You can specify a volume either by its label (as in volume KERNELS to load from the volume with a filesystem name KERNELS) or by number followed by a colon (as in volume 0: for the first filesystem or volume 1: for the second). See the Configuring the Boot Manager page for more on this new feature.
- 0.2.5 (4/9/2012)—Icon-handling improvements are key in this version. I've fixed a bug that caused icons to be replaced with ugly "not-found" default icons when rEFInd was launched in certain ways. I've also added support for .VolumeIcon.icns and .VolumeBadge.icns files to set loader tags and disk-type badges, respectively. (See the configuration page for details.) I've also fixed a bug that prevented rEFInd from finding the correct initial RAM disk for Linux kernels stored in the root directory of a partition.
- 0.2.4 (4/5/2012)—This version adds support for a new location for EFI shells (shellarch.efi in the ESP's root directory. It also adds two new refind.conf options: showtools and max_tags, and removes another one (disable). The options available in hideui are now essentially a combination of what disable and hideui did, minus functionality now present in showtools. I made these changes to reduce redundancy and to increase flexibility. See the Configuring the Boot Manager page for details.
- 0.2.3 (3/26/2012)—I've changed the Linux kernel configuration filename from linux.conf to refind_linux.conf with this version, to avoid a name collision with a planned future Linux kernel ability to read its options from a file called linux.conf. This version also includes a tentative bug fix for a problem that caused rEFInd to hang upon launching the second program (say, a boot loader after using a shell) on some systems; but on some computers, this fix causes an (apparently harmless) error message about "(re)opening our installation volume" upon returning from the first program. I've also added a logo for Arch Linux.
- 0.2.2 (3/23/2012)—This version fixes three bugs: One caused submenus to not appear on systems with screens of 800x600 or smaller; another caused rEFInd to hang when boot loader names were too long; and the third caused the program to fail when Linux kernels and their initial RAM disk files lacked version numbers.
- 0.2.1 (3/19/2012)—This version adds the ability to auto-scan Linux kernels with EFI stub loader support, provided a suitable linux.conf file exists in the kernel's directory. It also adds support for manual specification of submenus in refind.conf.
- 0.2.0 (3/14/2012)—This is the program's initial public release. It's based on rEFIt 0.14 plus a large number of patches taken from Debian's Linux-compilable rEFIt package. I then added UEFI-specific fixes, support for OS definition stanzas in the configuration file, a scrolling icon list on the main menu, and other minor improvements. This release has quite a few known bugs and limitations.
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.
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