# The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Getting rEFInd

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 12/15/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.7.6

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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:

- A binary zip file—Download this if you want to install rEFInd and/or its filesystem drivers on an x86 or x86-64 computer and have no need to test rEFInd first by booting it on an optical disc. This zip file package includes both x86 (aka IA32) and x86-64 (aka x64, AMD64, or EM64T) versions of rEFInd. Which you install depends on your architecture, as described on the Installing rEFInd page. Some users of Arch Linux have reported problems booting some specific Arch Linux kernels with rEFInd and some other tools. For them, a variant package exists in which the x86-64 binary was compiled with GNU-EFI rather than the usual TianoCore EDK2. This change helps some users with this problem; but using GNU-EFI also means that this version can't launch BIOS-mode OSes.
- A binary RPM file—If you use an RPM-based x86-64 Linux system such as Fedora or openSUSE, you can install the binary RPM package rather than use the binary zip file. (I don't provide an equivalent 32-bit package.) This package runs the `install.sh` script (described on the Installing rEFInd page) as part of the installation process. Distribution maintainers can examine the `refind.spec` file in the source package and tweak it to their needs. The source RPM file might or might not build on your system as-is; it relies on assumptions about the locations of the GNU-EFI development files.
- A binary Debian package—If you use an x86-64 version of Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, or another Debian-based distribution, you can install from this package, which was converted from the binary RPM package using `alien`.
- A CD-R image file—This download contains the same files as the binary zip file, but you can burn it to a CD-R to test rEFInd (and its filesystem drivers) without installing it first. (It boots on UEFI PCs, but fails on some older Macs.) If you like it, you can then copy the files from the CD-R to your hard disk. The files are named in such a way that the disc should boot on either 64-bit (x86-64) or 32-bit (x86) EFI computers. I've included an open source EFI shell program on this disc that's not included in the binary zip file, so that you can access an EFI shell from a bootable disc even if you don't have an EFI shell available from your regular hard disk. This can be an extremely valuable diagnostic tool if you know how to use an EFI shell.
- A USB flash drive image file—Although you can create your own rEFInd USB flash drive, you may find it easier to download this version and copy it to your USB drive with `dd` or some other low-level disk copying utility.
- A source code zip file—This is useful if you want to compile the software locally. Note that I use Linux with the TianoCore EFI Development Kit 2 (EDK2) to build my binary packages (above), although the GNU-EFI development tools are also supported.
- Source code via git—If you want to peruse the source code in your Web browser or get the very latest version (including pre-release bug fixes and updates), you can use the Sourceforge git repository. This access method is most useful to programmers, or at least to those who are familiar with programming tools. Note that if you need to ask "what's git?", this is probably not the best way for you to obtain rEFInd.

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:

- Arch Linux—You can obtain rEFInd from the Arch repositories, in both a stable version (the `refind-efi` package installable via `pacman`) and an experimental release built from rEFInd's git repository in the Arch User Repository (AUR), under the name `refind-efi-git`. The git release is likely to include pre-release bug fixes and new features, but those features may be poorly tested or undocumented. The last I checked, both builds used the Tianocore toolkit, and so support booting BIOS/legacy boot loaders on UEFI-based PCs.
- ALT Linux—This RPM-based distribution is experimenting with using rEFInd on EFI-based computers. As I write, the ALT developers haven't yet nailed down booting from an optical disc (it's a tricky and delicate task, especially when preparing a "hybrid" image), but they're working on the problem. They have an RPM of rEFInd; see this page for details.
- Fat Dog—This variant of Puppy Linux uses a combination of rEFInd and GRUB 2 to boot its installation medium in EFI mode and provides a rEFInd package in its repository set.
- The Nix Packages collection—This site creates packages for a number of OSes using its own packaging system.
- Slackware—Although it doesn't seem to provide an official build, this site has links to rEFInd binary packages for Slackware 13.37 and 14.0.

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 © 2012–2013 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.

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