<p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
-<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 4/19/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.7</p>
+<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
+5/20/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.0</p>
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<li>Load EFI drivers for filesystems or hardware devices not supported natively by your firmware. (This feature is absent in some builds of rEFIt and in rEFInd prior to version 0.2.7.)</li>
+<li>Inclusion of drivers for the Linux ReiserFS and ext2 filesystems in the
+ main package. (These drivers are absent from rEFInd prior to version
+ 0.4.0; and the rEFInd versions don't work on at least some Macs.)</li>
+
</ul>
<p>I've used rEFIt on a couple of computers for over a year, but I've found that it has some frustrating limitations. It tends to flood the screen with non-functional BIOS boot options, for instance; and it has a number of bugs on UEFI-based systems. I therefore expanded on rEFIt, giving rEFInd features that improve on or go beyond those of rEFIt, such as:</p>
<li>The ability to specify additional directories to scan for boot loaders and drivers (as of version 0.2.7).</li>
+<li>The ability to re-scan boot loaders, to assist when changing removable media or after making a change to the configuration file with an EFI shell (as of version 0.3.5).</li>
+
+<li>The ability to specify an additional icon storage directory, to assist in efforts to customize rEFInd's appearance (as of version 0.3.4).</li>
+
+<li>The ability to set the screen's resolution, within limits imposed by the EFI (as of rEFInd 0.3.0).</li>
+
<li>Proper handling of more OS options than can fit on the screen. (rEFIt displays an empty list in graphical mode when it detects too many OSes.)</li>
<li>Additional OS icons (all of which are Linux distributions, at least so far). This can make it easier to find a specific distribution in the boot list if you've installed multiple Linux distributions.</li>
<li>An "exit" option (disabled by default), so that you can return to whatever shell or boot manager you used to launch rEFInd, should this ability be desirable. (This feature first appeared in rEFInd 0.2.4.)</li>
+<li>Drivers for ISO-9660 and HFS+, which are not included in rEFIt. (The ISO-9660 driver is based on code from the rEFIt project, but was never completed by its original author. It was completed by Oracle for VirtualBox.)</li>
+
</ul>
<p>On the flip side, at least for Mac users, rEFInd comes with less sophisticated Mac installation tools than does rEFIt, in favor of more OS-agnostic packaging.</p>