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7 <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: Getting rEFInd</title>
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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 1/26/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.6</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/0.6.6/refind-src-0.6.6.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/0.6.6/refind-bin-0.6.6.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.</li>
118
119 <li><b><a
120 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.6/refind-0.6.6-1.x86_64.rpm/download">A
121 binary RPM file</a></b>&mdash;If you use an RPM-based <i>x</i>86-64
122 Linux system such as Fedora or openSUSE, you can install the binary RPM
123 package rather than use the binary zip file. (I don't provide an
124 equivalent 32-bit package.) This package runs the <tt>install.sh</tt>
125 script (described on the <a href="installing.html">Installing
126 rEFInd</a> page) as part of the installation process. Distribution
127 maintainers can examine the <tt>refind.spec</tt> file in the source
128 package and tweak it to their needs. The <a
129 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.6/refind-0.6.6-1.src.rpm/download">source
130 RPM file</a> might or might not build on your system as-is; it relies
131 on assumptions about the locations of the GNU-EFI development
132 files.</li>
133
134 <li><b><a
135 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.6/refind_0.6.6-1_amd64.deb/download">A
136 binary Debian package</a></b>&mdash;If you use an <i>x</i>86-64 version
137 of Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, or another Debian-based distribution, you can
138 install from this package, which was converted from the binary RPM
139 package using <tt>alien</tt>.</li>
140
141 <!--
142 <li><b><a
143 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.4.7/refind-bin-gnuefi-0.4.7.zip/download">A
144 binary zip file (built with GNU-EFI)</a></b>&mdash;This package is just
145 like the preceding one, except that it was built using the GNU-EFI
146 development kit rather than the TianoCore EFI Development Kit 2 (EDK2)
147 that was used to build the other binary. I originally used GNU-EFI to
148 develop rEFInd, but the GNU-EFI toolkit doesn't support the legacy
149 (BIOS-mode) boot calls on UEFI-based PCs, so I now consider the
150 TianoCore build to be the primary one. (Macs can boot legacy OSes using
151 either build.)</li>
152 -->
153
154 <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>
155
156 <li><b><a
157 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.6/refind-cd-0.6.6.zip/download">A
158 CD-R image file</a></b>&mdash;This download contains the same files as
159 the binary zip file, but you can burn it to a CD-R to test rEFInd
160 (and its filesystem drivers) without installing it first. (It boots on
161 UEFI PCs, but fails on some older Macs.) If you like it, you can then
162 copy the files from the CD-R to your hard disk. The files are named in
163 such a way that the disc should boot on either 64-bit (<i>x</i>86-64)
164 or 32-bit (<i>x</i>86) EFI computers. I've included an open source EFI
165 shell program on this disc that's not included in the binary zip file,
166 so that you can access an EFI shell from a bootable disc even if you
167 don't have an EFI shell available from your regular hard disk. This can
168 be an extremely valuable diagnostic tool if you know how to use an EFI
169 shell.</li>
170
171 <p class="sidebar"><b>Tip:</b> If you want to make your own bootable USB
172 flash drive, download the binary zip file or CD-R image file, prepare a USB
173 flash drive with a FAT32 partition, and then use the <tt>install.sh</tt>
174 program's <tt>--usedefault</tt> option, and perhaps the
175 <tt>--alldrivers</tt> option, as in <tt class="userinput">bash install.sh
176 --usedefault /dev/sdd1 --alldrivers</tt> to install to the first partition
177 on <tt>/dev/sdd</tt>. This procedure should work even on a BIOS-booted
178 computer.</p>
179
180 <li><b><a
181 href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.6.6/refind-flashdrive-0.6.6.zip/download">A
182 USB flash drive image file</a></b>&mdash;Although you can create
183 your own rEFInd USB flash drive, you may find it easier to download
184 this version and copy it to your USB drive with <tt>dd</tt> or some
185 other low-level disk copying utility.</li>
186
187 <li><b><a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/code">Source code via
188 git</a></b>&mdash;If you want to peruse the source code in your Web
189 browser or get the very latest version (including pre-release bug fixes
190 and updates), you can use the Sourceforge git repository. This access
191 method is most useful to programmers, or at least to those who are
192 familiar with programming tools. Note that if you need to ask "what's
193 git?", this is probably not the best way for you to obtain rEFInd.</li>
194
195 </ul>
196
197 <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>
198
199 <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>
200
201 <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>
202
203 <h2>Getting rEFInd from Your OS's Repositories</h2>
204
205 <p>I know of a small number of pre-packaged versions of rEFInd, either in official OS repositories or in ancillary repositories:</p>
206
207 <ul>
208
209 <li><b>Arch Linux</b>&mdash;You can obtain rEFInd from the Arch
210 repositories, in both a stable version (the <tt>refind-efi</tt> package
211 installable via <tt>pacman</tt>) and an experimental release built from
212 rEFInd's git repository in the Arch User Repository (AUR), under the
213 name <tt>refind-efi-git</tt>. The git release is likely to include
214 pre-release bug fixes and new features, but those features may be
215 poorly tested or undocumented. The last I checked, both builds used the
216 Tianocore toolkit, and so support booting BIOS/legacy boot loaders on
217 UEFI-based PCs.</li>
218
219 <li><b>ALT Linux</b>&mdash;This RPM-based distribution is experimenting with
220 using rEFInd on EFI-based computers. As I write, the ALT developers haven't
221 yet nailed down booting from an optical disc (it's a tricky and delicate
222 task, especially when preparing a "hybrid" image), but they're working on
223 the problem. They have an RPM of rEFInd; see <a
224 href="http://packages.altlinux.org/en/Sisyphus/srpms/refind">this page</a>
225 for details.</li>
226
227 <li><b><a href="http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/">Fat
228 Dog</a></b>&mdash;This variant of Puppy Linux uses a combination of
229 rEFInd and GRUB 2 to boot its installation medium in EFI mode and
230 provides a rEFInd package in its repository set.</li>
231
232 <li><b>The <a href="http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/">Nix Packages
233 collection</a></b>&mdash;This site creates packages for a number of
234 OSes using its own packaging system.</li>
235
236 <li><b>Slackware</b>&mdash;Although it doesn't seem to provide an official
237 build, <a href="http://franck-barbenoire.fr/spip.php?article198">this
238 site</a> has links to rEFInd binary packages for Slackware 13.37 and
239 14.0.</li>
240
241 </ul>
242
243 <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>
244
245 <hr />
246
247 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
248
249 <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>
250
251 <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>
252
253 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
254
255 <p><a href="installing.html">Learn how to install rEFInd</a></p>
256
257 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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