The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Getting rEFInd

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 3/23/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.2

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!

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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 alpha-quality software! Although rEFIt 0.14, upon which rEFInd is based, is beta-quality, I've changed a great deal of the code, and I'm still learning about it. I'm discovering bugs (old and new) and fixing them every day or two. 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.

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 three different forms:

If you're using another platform, 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.)

If you download a zip file, you'll need to extract the files with 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.


copyright © 2012 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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