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In theory, EFI implementations should provide boot managers. Unfortunately, in practice these boot managers are often so poor as to be useless. The worst I've personally encountered is on Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI, which provides you with no boot options whatsoever, beyond choosing the boot device (hard disk vs. optical disc, for instance). I've heard of others that are just as bad. For this reason, a good EFI boot manager—either standalone or as part of a boot loader—is a practical necessity for multi-booting on an EFI computer. That's where rEFIt and rEFInd come into play.
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In theory, EFI implementations should provide boot managers. Unfortunately, in practice these boot managers are often so poor as to be useless. The worst I've personally encountered is on Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI, which provides you with no boot options whatsoever, beyond choosing the boot device (hard disk vs. optical disc, for instance). I've heard of others that are just as bad. For this reason, a good EFI boot manager—either standalone or as part of a boot loader—is a practical necessity for multi-booting on an EFI computer. That's where rEFInd comes into play.
I decided to fork the earlier rEFIt project because, although rEFIt is a useful program, it's got several important limitations, such as poor control over the boot loader detection process and an ability to display at most a handful of boot loader entries on its main screen. Christoph Pfisterer, rEFIt's author, stopped updating rEFIt with version 0.14, which was released in March of 2010. Since I forked rEFIt to rEFInd, Christoph has begun pointing rEFIt users to rEFInd as a successor project.
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Installing rEFInd—Instructions for installing rEFInd, using Linux, OS X, and Windows
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rEFInd and OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)—Apple's latest OS X makes some changes that require your attention
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Using rEFInd—Basic usage instructions for the boot loader
Configuring the Boot Manager—For advanced users, information on customizing a rEFInd installation
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My own EFI Boot Loaders for Linux page provides information on installing and configuring several common Linux EFI boot loaders and boot managers.
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My Linux on UEFI: A Quick Installation Guide page provides helpful tips on how to install Linux on EFI-based systems.
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Phoenix Technologies maintains a wiki on EFI topics, including information on many EFI system calls useful to programmers.
Matthew J. Garrett, the developer of the shim boot loader to manage Secure Boot, maintains a blog in which he often writes about EFI issues.
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Adam Williamson has written a good summary of what EFI is and how it works.
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J. A. Watson has a review of rEFInd on an HP laptop on ZDNet. He had serious problems because of the HP's UEFI bugs, but finally got it to work.
James Jesudason has a tutorial on installing Ubuntu 13.04 beta on a Macbook Retina Pro on this blog page. I'd recommend using a Linux filesystem driver to read the kernel directly from a Linux filesystem rather than copy the kernel to the OS X partition as in the tutorial, but either method will work.
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The Clover boot loader is a Hackintosh boot loader that incorporates, among other things, its own unique forks of rEFIt and of DUET (a TianoCore tool to boot UEFI on BIOS-based computers).
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Pete Batard's efifs project aims to port GRUB's filesystem drivers to function as standalone EFI filesystem drivers. It's currently a work in progress but shows great promise, and several drivers are usable for limited purposes today.
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Communications
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-copyright © 2012–2013 by Roderick W. Smith
+copyright © 2012–2015 by Roderick W. Smith
This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.