The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Getting rEFInd

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 9/13/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.9.1

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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:

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:

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.

Go to the main rEFInd page

Learn how to install rEFInd

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