The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Getting rEFInd
by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
11/8/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.10.0
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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 several different forms:
- 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. Some users of Arch
Linux have reported problems booting some specific Arch Linux kernels
with rEFInd and some other tools. For them, a variant
package exists in which the x86-64 binary was compiled with
GNU-EFI rather than the usual TianoCore EDK2. This change helps some
users with this problem.
- A
binary RPM file—If you use an RPM-based x86-64
Linux system such as Fedora or openSUSE, you can install the binary RPM
package rather than use the binary zip file. (I don't provide an
equivalent 32-bit package.) This package runs the
refind-install script (described on the Installing rEFInd page) as part of the
installation process. Distribution maintainers can examine the
refind.spec file in the source package and tweak it to their
needs. The source
RPM file might or might not build on your system as-is; it relies
on assumptions about the locations of the GNU-EFI development
files.
- A
binary Debian package—If you use an x86-64 version
of Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, or another Debian-based distribution, you can
install from this package, which was converted from the binary RPM
package using alien. Note that an Ubuntu
PPA is available, which may install more smoothly and will cause
rEFInd to automatically update with other packages.
- 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.
- A
USB flash drive image file—Although you can create
your own rEFInd USB flash drive, you may find it easier to download
this version and copy it to your USB drive with dd or some
other low-level disk copying utility.
- A
source code tarball—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 binary packages (above),
although the GNU-EFI development
tools are also supported, and are used in building the Ubuntu PPA.
- 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. 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:
- Ubuntu—Although an official Ubuntu
package isn't available, I've created a rEFInd PPA
for Ubuntu. To use it, open a Terminal window and type sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rodsmith/refind,
then sudo apt-get update. You can then type
sudo apt-get install refind to install the
package. Thereafter, the rEFInd version will update along with your
other software. This package is built with GNU-EFI and is not signed
with a Secure Boot key; however, the install script (which launches
automatically when you install the package) should sign the binary with
a locally-generated key if it detects that your system uses Secure
Boot. Thus, if you've previously installed one of my binaries on a
Secure Boot system and added its key as a MOK, you'll have to add your
local key when you reboot.
- 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.
- ALT Linux—This RPM-based distribution is experimenting
with using rEFInd on EFI-based computers. As I write, the ALT
developers haven't yet nailed down booting from an optical disc (it's a
tricky and delicate task, especially when preparing a "hybrid" image),
but they're working on the problem. They have an RPM of rEFInd; see this
page for details.
- Gentoo Linux—An official ebuild of rEFInd is available;
see here
for details and here
for Gentoo's official rEFInd documentation.
- Slackware—As far as I know, an official rEFInd package is
not available as part of Slackware; however, a Slackware
package from SlackBuilds is available.
- Fat
Dog—This variant of Puppy Linux uses a combination of
rEFInd and GRUB 2 to boot its installation medium in EFI mode and
provides a rEFInd package in its repository set.
- The Nix Packages
collection—This site creates packages for a number of
OSes using its own packaging system.
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 © 2012–2015 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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