<body>
<h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />rEFInd Features</h1>
-
<p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
+<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: 4/5/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.4</p>
-
+<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
+5/15/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.3.5</p>
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<li>Launch EFI boot loaders or, on Macs, launch BIOS-based boot loaders. (I have yet to get the BIOS-launching feature to work on a UEFI-based PC, but it might work on a model I don't own.)</li>
-<li>Launch options for an
EFI shell, disk partitioner, and other optional external components. (See the <a href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> section for information on how to obtain and install these components.)</li>
+<li>Launch options for an
external EFI shell or disk partitioner. (See the <a href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> section for information on how to obtain and install these components.)</li>
<li>Set OS-specific boot options, such as to launch Mac OS X with verbose text-mode debug messages.</li>
+<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>
+
</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>
<ul>
+<li>Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally, such as those I've just mentioned.</li>
+
<li>User-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders:
<ul>
<li>The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.</li>
+<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>
</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. Also, rEFInd doesn't support loading EFI drivers; that job should be done in other ways when using rEFInd.</p>
+<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>
<p>If these features sound useful, then read on and try rEFInd. If not, you may need to look elsewhere. My <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html">Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux</a> page may be useful to you in this case.</p>