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7 <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: Getting rEFInd</title>
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11 <body>
12 <h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />Getting rEFInd</h1>
13
14 <p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
15 href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
16
17 <p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
18 3/18/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.8</p>
19
20 <p>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!</p>
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85
86 <hr />
87
88 <p>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 <a href="index.html">main page.</a></p>
89
90 <hr />
91
92 <p><b>Note:</b> I consider rEFInd to be <i>beta-quality software!</i> 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.</p>
93
94 <h2>Getting rEFInd from Sourceforge</h2>
95
96 <p>You can find the rEFInd source code and binary packages at <a href="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/refind/">its SourceForge page.</a> Note that rEFInd is OS-independent&mdash;it runs before the OS, so you download the same binary package for any OS. You can obtain rEFInd in several different forms:</p>
97
98 <ul>
99
100 <li><b><a
101 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind-src-0.6.8.zip/download">A
102 source code zip file</a></b>&mdash;This is useful if you want to compile
103 the software locally. Note that I use Linux with the <a
104 href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/tianocore/">TianoCore EFI
105 Development Kit 2 (EDK2)</a> to build my binary packages (below),
106 although the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnu-efi">GNU-EFI</a>
107 development tools are also supported.</li>
108
109 <li><b><a
110 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind-bin-0.6.8.zip/download">A
111 binary zip file</a></b>&mdash;Download this if you want to install
112 rEFInd and/or its filesystem drivers on an <i>x</i>86 or <i>x</i>86-64
113 computer and have no need to test rEFInd first by booting it on an
114 optical disc. This zip file package includes both <i>x</i>86 (aka IA32)
115 and <i>x</i>86-64 (aka <i>x</i>64, AMD64, or EM64T) versions of rEFInd.
116 Which you install depends on your architecture, as described on the <a
117 href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> page. Some users of Arch
118 Linux have reported problems booting some specific Arch Linux kernels
119 with rEFInd and some other tools. For them, a <a
120 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind-bin-gnuefi-0.6.8.zip/download">variant
121 package</a> exists in which the <i>x</i>86-64 binary was compiled with
122 GNU-EFI rather than the usual TianoCore EDK2. This change helps some
123 users with this problem; but using GNU-EFI also means that this version
124 can't launch BIOS-mode OSes.</li>
125
126 <li><b><a
127 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind-0.6.8-1.x86_64.rpm/download">A
128 binary RPM file</a></b>&mdash;If you use an RPM-based <i>x</i>86-64
129 Linux system such as Fedora or openSUSE, you can install the binary RPM
130 package rather than use the binary zip file. (I don't provide an
131 equivalent 32-bit package.) This package runs the <tt>install.sh</tt>
132 script (described on the <a href="installing.html">Installing
133 rEFInd</a> page) as part of the installation process. Distribution
134 maintainers can examine the <tt>refind.spec</tt> file in the source
135 package and tweak it to their needs. The <a
136 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind-0.6.8-1.src.rpm/download">source
137 RPM file</a> might or might not build on your system as-is; it relies
138 on assumptions about the locations of the GNU-EFI development
139 files.</li>
140
141 <li><b><a
142 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind_0.6.8-1_amd64.deb/download">A
143 binary Debian package</a></b>&mdash;If you use an <i>x</i>86-64 version
144 of Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, or another Debian-based distribution, you can
145 install from this package, which was converted from the binary RPM
146 package using <tt>alien</tt>.</li>
147
148 <!--
149 <li><b><a
150 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.4.7/refind-bin-gnuefi-0.4.7.zip/download">A
151 binary zip file (built with GNU-EFI)</a></b>&mdash;This package is just
152 like the preceding one, except that it was built using the GNU-EFI
153 development kit rather than the TianoCore EFI Development Kit 2 (EDK2)
154 that was used to build the other binary. I originally used GNU-EFI to
155 develop rEFInd, but the GNU-EFI toolkit doesn't support the legacy
156 (BIOS-mode) boot calls on UEFI-based PCs, so I now consider the
157 TianoCore build to be the primary one. (Macs can boot legacy OSes using
158 either build.)</li>
159 -->
160
161 <p class="sidebar"><b>Note:</b> At the moment, neither the bootable CD-R image file nor the bootable USB flash drive image file supports booting with Secure Boot active.</p>
162
163 <li><b><a
164 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind-cd-0.6.8.zip/download">A
165 CD-R image file</a></b>&mdash;This download contains the same files as
166 the binary zip file, but you can burn it to a CD-R to test rEFInd
167 (and its filesystem drivers) without installing it first. (It boots on
168 UEFI PCs, but fails on some older Macs.) If you like it, you can then
169 copy the files from the CD-R to your hard disk. The files are named in
170 such a way that the disc should boot on either 64-bit (<i>x</i>86-64)
171 or 32-bit (<i>x</i>86) EFI computers. I've included an open source EFI
172 shell program on this disc that's not included in the binary zip file,
173 so that you can access an EFI shell from a bootable disc even if you
174 don't have an EFI shell available from your regular hard disk. This can
175 be an extremely valuable diagnostic tool if you know how to use an EFI
176 shell.</li>
177
178 <p class="sidebar"><b>Tip:</b> If you want to make your own bootable USB
179 flash drive, download the binary zip file or CD-R image file, prepare a USB
180 flash drive with a FAT32 partition, and then use the <tt>install.sh</tt>
181 program's <tt>--usedefault</tt> option, and perhaps the
182 <tt>--alldrivers</tt> option, as in <tt class="userinput">bash install.sh
183 --usedefault /dev/sdd1 --alldrivers</tt> to install to the first partition
184 on <tt>/dev/sdd</tt>. This procedure should work even on a BIOS-booted
185 computer.</p>
186
187 <li><b><a
188 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.8/refind-flashdrive-0.6.8.zip/download">A
189 USB flash drive image file</a></b>&mdash;Although you can create
190 your own rEFInd USB flash drive, you may find it easier to download
191 this version and copy it to your USB drive with <tt>dd</tt> or some
192 other low-level disk copying utility.</li>
193
194 <li><b><a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/code">Source code via
195 git</a></b>&mdash;If you want to peruse the source code in your Web
196 browser or get the very latest version (including pre-release bug fixes
197 and updates), you can use the Sourceforge git repository. This access
198 method is most useful to programmers, or at least to those who are
199 familiar with programming tools. Note that if you need to ask "what's
200 git?", this is probably not the best way for you to obtain rEFInd.</li>
201
202 </ul>
203
204 <p>If you're using a platform other than <i>x</i>86 or <i>x</i>86-64, 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.)</p>
205
206 <p>To extract the files from the zip file images I've provided, you'll need a tool such as <tt>unzip</tt>, which is included with Linux and Mac OS X. Numerous Windows utilities also support this format, such as <a href="http://www.pkware.com/software/pkzip/">PKZIP</a> and <a href="http://www.7-zip.org/">7-Zip.</a></p>
207
208 <p>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 <a href="installing.html">installation page.</a> Using the fallback boot loader name of <tt>EFI/boot/bootx64.efi</tt> is likely to be the most useful way to install rEFInd to a removable medium.</p>
209
210 <h2>Getting rEFInd from Your OS's Repositories</h2>
211
212 <p>I know of a small number of pre-packaged versions of rEFInd, either in official OS repositories or in ancillary repositories:</p>
213
214 <ul>
215
216 <li><b>Arch Linux</b>&mdash;You can obtain rEFInd from the Arch
217 repositories, in both a stable version (the <tt>refind-efi</tt> package
218 installable via <tt>pacman</tt>) and an experimental release built from
219 rEFInd's git repository in the Arch User Repository (AUR), under the
220 name <tt>refind-efi-git</tt>. The git release is likely to include
221 pre-release bug fixes and new features, but those features may be
222 poorly tested or undocumented. The last I checked, both builds used the
223 Tianocore toolkit, and so support booting BIOS/legacy boot loaders on
224 UEFI-based PCs.</li>
225
226 <li><b>ALT Linux</b>&mdash;This RPM-based distribution is experimenting with
227 using rEFInd on EFI-based computers. As I write, the ALT developers haven't
228 yet nailed down booting from an optical disc (it's a tricky and delicate
229 task, especially when preparing a "hybrid" image), but they're working on
230 the problem. They have an RPM of rEFInd; see <a
231 href="http://packages.altlinux.org/en/Sisyphus/srpms/refind">this page</a>
232 for details.</li>
233
234 <li><b><a href="http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/">Fat
235 Dog</a></b>&mdash;This variant of Puppy Linux uses a combination of
236 rEFInd and GRUB 2 to boot its installation medium in EFI mode and
237 provides a rEFInd package in its repository set.</li>
238
239 <li><b>The <a href="http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/">Nix Packages
240 collection</a></b>&mdash;This site creates packages for a number of
241 OSes using its own packaging system.</li>
242
243 <li><b>Slackware</b>&mdash;Although it doesn't seem to provide an official
244 build, <a href="http://franck-barbenoire.fr/spip.php?article198">this
245 site</a> has links to rEFInd binary packages for Slackware 13.37 and
246 14.0.</li>
247
248 </ul>
249
250 <p>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 <a href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">drop me a line.</a></p>
251
252 <hr />
253
254 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
255
256 <p>This document is licensed under the terms of the <a href="FDL-1.3.txt">GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.</a></p>
257
258 <p>If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at <a href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com.</a> Thanks.</p>
259
260 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
261
262 <p><a href="installing.html">Learn how to install rEFInd</a></p>
263
264 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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