What is Reddit's opinion of rEFInd - Boot Manager?

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Mint. Worked best for dual boot for me. Why get rid of SL when you can dual boot?

Really any of these would be fine though:

Ubuntu

Fedora

Mint

Debian

Slackware, because if I didn't say it, my friend would cry.

Edit: OK OK OK SLACKWARE IS NOT A GOOD BEGINNER DISTRO. Apparently I need to point that out. It was only included to prevent someone from crying. HAVE YOU NO HEART /R/TECHNOLOGY?!

Edit2: In case you want to dual boot, get either rEFIt or rEFInd. rEFIt was discontinued and rEFInd is a fork of it that is currently being supported by a different developer.

While you do need a bootloader in most cases, and that would be the default behavior for many distro installers, it's not an absolute requirement these days with UEFI:

> If your motherboard has a good UEFI implementation, it is possible to embed the kernel parameters within a UEFI boot entry and for the motherboard to boot Arch directly.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/EFISTUB#Using_UEFI_directly

Also, check out rEFInd: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ which is included with multiple distros.

Really easy. I did it. Just a few pointers:

1. Make sure you are running in EFI mode. Check if efivars -l returns something or not.
2. Make sure that you have a separate EFI partition which is mounted into /boot.
3. Now you can simply go and install rEFInd as sudo <fav pkg manager> install refind. Keep an eye out on the output of the command to see if it finished successfully.
4. Before rebooting make sure that you know the keycombo that makes your system enter the Boot Menu (so that you can use GRUB if rEFInd failed).
5. Reboot.

Now, head on over to rEFInd and read it from end to end (only skip the parts not relevant to you). Install some themes and then make yourself your own theme. It's really easy.

Look at what I got now. http://imgur.com/a/1r20T

EDIT: The one in the screenshot isn't my own theme. It's this one.

Can't do it, I'm afraid. You can, however, default to booting into an alternate startup manager such as rEFInd.

If you have trouble installing rEFInd, let us know which version of OS X you are running, and also copy the results of the following Terminal command to Gist so we may advise further:

diskutil list

From the official website: > Like rEFIt, rEFInd is a boot manager, meaning that it presents a menu of options to the user when the computer first starts up, as shown below. rEFInd is not a boot loader, which is a program that loads an OS kernel and hands off control to it. (Since version 3.3.0, the Linux kernel has included a built-in boot loader, though, so this distinction is rather artificial these days, at least for Linux.) Many popular boot managers, such as the Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB), are also boot loaders, which can blur the distinction in many users' minds. All EFI-capable OSes include boot loaders, so this limitation isn't a problem. If you're using Linux, you should be aware that several EFI boot loaders are available, so choosing between them can be a challenge. In fact, the Linux kernel can function as an EFI boot loader for itself, which gives rEFInd characteristics similar to a boot loader for Linux.

If you're looking for something graphical, have a look at rEFInd - it has a few themes as well, but not as many as Burg

May I recommend trying out rEFInd? It has a nice graphical interface and almost worked out of the box for me (because of my pc looking only for a specific bootloader, I had to trick it into thinking rEFInd was the file it was looking for) after installing. It also found my Windows partition without doing any configuration.

Cheers. The only issue with the DVD is that the Mac's boot manager doesn't give you the option of selecting its EFI bootloader... You should be able to select it using rEFInd, however! If so, rEFInd would refer to it as the "fallback bootloader."

It's not "their own bootloader".

The guy in the video is using a newer Macbook Air, which only does EFI boot, so he's using the rEFInd boot manager, which uses EFI to boot the kernel directly, instead of doing the old BIOS -> bootloader -> kernel (new: EFI -> kernel).

All of the "doomsaying" applies to all systems, not just FreeNAS. It's just most people don't talk about or even think about the reliability and safety of their data (until their single hard drive dies). In a forum dedicated to reliable storage of data, of course the discussion is going to revolve around worst-case scenarios.

I've been through several upgrades and never had a problem till 9.3. The issue with 9.3 is that it uses GPT, and not all systems support that. In particular my machine (an old 2006 Mac Pro 1,1) doesn't like booting non-OSX GPT partitions, and wouldn't boot. No problem, I just reinstalled 9.2.1.9 and restored my config, and was back in business. It will continue running until I get a proper machine, or I can just stay at 9.2.1.9 forever. Or try rEFInd, but I'm probably going to use this as an excuse to upgrade the hardware. :)

>but I still worry that this is somehow less robust than my dinky old ReadyNas.

Your ReadyNAS also has ECC RAM, requires a UPS, and if you click the wrong thing in the GUI, will destroy all your data.

Your exposure to danger hasn't changed; you're just more aware of it now.

I doubt it will. However you can install it on your pc. It's called rEFInd. It comes with a default theme but you can add any theme you want and personalize it how you prefer.

rEFInd is a boot manager not a bootloader like GRUB. Once you make a selection it passes control over to a bootloader, in my installation GRUB for Arch and the default OS X bootloader for Mac.

You can read more on rEFInd here.

Installation instructions for the theme are in the Github repo: https://github.com/lukechilds/refind-ambience#installation

The 512Mb requirement seems to be a spec mandated by Microsoft. It seems like it's ok to make it smaller though. I made mine exactly 512Mb.

Also, just to throw out one more recommendation for boot managers for the OP, check out rEFInd. I made a theme for it a few months ago and got a lot of good feedback!

If you get a macbook with a touchbar, you will not be able to run Linux.

If you use one of the 15" retina macbook pros, you will need a GPT table, /dev/sda1 must be hfsplus, and you will want to use rEFInd http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

You're best off with a Dell XPS 13 or XPS 15

rEFInd is compatible with any computer with an x86 processor and UEFI, so yes. It appears you can install it from any major OS (Windows, Mac and Linux) however it is completely pointless if you only have one OS installed.

The only problem with the layout right now is that your recovery partition has the wrong type listed. This can be fixed simply by running the following:

sudo asr adjust --target /dev/disk0s3 --settype Apple_Boot

If you're on El Capitan, you will need to temporarily disably SIP to be able to run that command. Afterwards, Disk Utility will treat it like it's supposed to, allowing you to shuffle it around as you grow your main partition.

The triple-boot won't be difficult, especially with your model; native EFI booting is all it supports, so you'll be able to repartition, etcetera without having to worry about bootloaders. Start by installing Windows via the normal, guided Boot Camp process. Once that's complete, you may shrink either or both of OS X and Windows' partitions to make room for the new ones.

To actually be able to pick from any of the OS's when booting, start with the utterly amazing rEFInd. It's possible to set up the Mac's built-in boot manager too, but you can worry about that later.

These days it's actually quite straight forward:

• install refind
• reduce your system partition to make space for the Linux partition
• write installer image to usb: dd if=<iso-file> of=/dev/disks1 bs=4m
• boot from USB and install Linux distro to a newly created partition

I recommend e.g. Debian as it takes care of installing the right EFI stub. You pretty much pointed out one problem though yourself: lack of ethernet port. Macs use a broadcom wifi chip that still need a binary blob to work. So make sure you get the right packages from a different computer before you do anything after the installation to get wifi to work.

to ease booting on a multiboot system have you tried using rEFInd? its a development of the Mac tool rEFIt, and it looks gorgeous when configured properly.

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Never mind, I fixed my problem, I just installed rEFInd for anyone who may be reading this at a future date, here is what my problem was: I didn't have efibootmgr installed to do that just run the command

sudo eopkg it efibootmgr

and from there install rEFInd using this tutorial

Is there a question in your post? If you're asking whether you can install FreeNAS on a Mac Pro 4,1 then I can say yes you can. That's what I have running now.

I'm on FreeNAS 9.10.1. I haven't tried any newer versions although I have a spare MP 3,1 that I'm hoping to test on. It can run ESXi 6.5 with no issues so I think it will probably handle FreeNAS fine.

Mine has:

• 1xW3520 @ 2.67GHz
• 32GB RAM
• 4x3TB WD Reds
• 1x120 GB SSD

I left the optical drive in there but I suppose I can take it out and install one more hard drive. I don't think you're going to be able to fit 7 hard drives in there. You're going to want to run the OS off an internal drive (small SSD) instead of trying to get it to run from a thumb drive.

You may have to use rEFInd for a boot manager. I don't remember at the moment what I did.

The MemoPad 7 probably won't work easily, because it doesn't have a standard BIOS/UEFI configuration screen. Most Android devices, even if using x86 processors use a very limited bootloading firmware. So you'll likely need to find a special hack of sorts to daisy chain off that. Or possibly use a chroot environment and the Android kernel.

The Insignia's are easy because they are standard PCs. (I have a couple of 8 inch ones myself) Just boot into the BIOS/UEFI screen and disable secure boot. As I recall they don't include a legacy boot module, so you need a UEFI boot loader. I found rEFInd to work well enough. From there some hardware quirks are issues (touch screen may require some tweaks), but getting Linux to start isn't a problem.

The above stated, there are (in my opinion) no viable touch UIs for native Linux. Gnome/KDE are too bloated (not to mention poorly designed in my opinion). Other mDE/WMs are still keyboard/mouse centric. This means that you can get Linux loaded, but it feels somewhat shoehorned into the device.

Windows and Android, for all their other issues, are still farther along in creating a usable touch UI.

If you got UEFI just go with refind. BURG is just an old mess (no offence BURG users). And the themes are better and still updated. themes

For themes of all kind → deviantart

Quick note: That's called the "boot manager"; the &quot;boot loader&quot; is the application that spawns OS X.

Anyway, you cannot automatically boot into the built-in boot manager, but you can automatically boot into rEFInd.

rEFIt hasn't been updated in five years, and its author now recommends using the active fork rEFInd instead. If rEFInd still sees this phantom boot loader, it is extremely customizable.

Yes, the PC firmware can usually only load things from a fat32 partition (macs can also access HFS+) and so the loaders and other tools live in the EFI subdirectory of the ESP partition.

You'll find these files in subdirectories in/boot/efi/EFI.

You can also put the kernel and initrd there too and then the boot directory can live on the zfs filesystem. E.g.: /boot/efi/EFI/debian/vmlinuz and /boot/efi/EFI/debian/initrd.img. In this case its easier to use the refind boot manager but you can boot the kernel directly.

rEFIt n'est plus mis à jour depuis des années, c'est rEFInd maintenant : http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Aussi, je suis sur un hackintosh et on utilise Clover, ça ne s'utilise pas pour des macs legit, cependant pour la post install, ça reste identique.

Si tu as des soucis à un moment, n'hésite pas à demander.

Edit; sur un seul HDD / SSD je suppose ?

Ugh I hear ya.. UEFI is a cool idea but a lot of manufacturers have horrible EFI bootstrap routines that basically are hardcoded to execute the Windows boot loader, basically subverting the whole "extensibility" concept behind UEFI. My Sony was the same way.. it doesn't even give grub a chance to get a word in edgewise.

To get anything besides windows to boot, you need to do some hardcore EFI hacking and replace the Windows boot program in the EFI partition with something like rEFInd:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
this lets you really customize what boots, and in what order.

It did overwrite my EFI. The only way I got my laptop to dualboot was by replacing my Sony and Windows EFI with rEFInd (because Sonys UEFI implementation sucks balls and is geared towards windows, the bootorder is ignored/overwritten on boot in favour of Windows etc) the update to windows 10 destroyed that again.

I run Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon on a 2011 MBA without issues so yes, it's possible.

One thing I stuggled with a bit was to get the boot sequence working, which might be a bit tricky.

Personally, I've used the Refind boot manager to automatically choose my Mint install after 1 sec, then I've the GRUB2 screen (GNU/Linux usual bootloader) then it boot Linux Mint. A good read might be the various Arch Linux wiki entries for macbooks

If you've a really new mac, the hardware support is usually known to be below average but rapidly improving.

I don't see any cons of dualbooting once everything is working fine. Sure you loose a bit of disk space but that's about it.

Of course, make sure you backup your data before playing with ~~fire~~ bits :) !

From The rEFInd Boot Manager: Methods of Booting Linux (a.k.a., “TFM”):

>This method requires that your /boot directory, whether it's on a separate partition or is a regular directory in your root (/) filesystem, be readable by the EFI. At the moment, all EFI implementations can read FAT and Macs can read HFS+. By using drivers, you can make any EFI read HFS+, ISO-9660, ReiserFS, ext2fs, ext3fs, ext4fs, or Btrfs. Thus, if you use any of these filesystems on a regular partition (not an LVM or RAID configuration) that holds your kernels in /boot, you qualify for this easy method. The default partition layouts used by Ubuntu, Fedora, and many other distributions qualify, because they use one of these filesystems (usually ext4fs) in a normal partition or on a separate /boot partition. You must also have a 3.3.0 or later Linux kernel with EFI stub support, of course.

So, it's possible to have /boot included on the root partition, if you meet all those requirements. (BTW, you'll still need a separate volume/partition for swap.)

you'll have to put a 200mb FAT32 efi partition at the beginning of the flash drive with an GPT partitiontable and then put the rEFInd Bootloader on it, blessing it with macOSX, then you'll need to configure it to boot the FreeBSD boot partition (which mustn't be ZFS because there are no drivers for that).

All that is necessary because BIOS emulation mode on macs doesn't work with USB/Firewire drives...

edit: oh it seems freeBSD has no EFI support, so you'll also need to setup an Grubx64.efi bootloader to boot it. yeah I think an internal SATA drive would be the more viable solution by now...

It should be noted that rEFIt is no longer being maintained so if you are having trouble with rEFIt, like I was having with Debian on my macbook (although it seemed to work just fine with Ubuntu, for some reason), give rEFInd a try; it is a fork of rEFIt that is still being maintained.

You might want to have a look at rEFInd. It is an EFI boot manager created partially with the intent of mitigating some problems caused by bad EFI implementations.

You might find some useful tips in this article too: https://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/

It’s a little bit of work and it does have a quirk in the recent version that iMacs don’t show the full 5k res when booted through it (they already know).

rEFInd bootloader

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

at first it looks like something setup on a Win95 computer, but it’s highly skinnable and can be made to look as sleek and minimal as you like! :)

double, triple, quadruple... in/external disk, doesn’t matter

though you need to put it on a USB stick and reboot into the installer, because it direct writes onto the EFI partition and thus, SIP needs to be disabled to do so (the devs already thought of it and it’s a switch in the GUI, so by using this method you don’t have to first boot into Recovery and hack this workaround of disabling SIP into the terminal). After the install, just flick the switch again (or put ”sudo csrutil enable” into the terminal, like me who forgot to do so) and your mac-system bodyguard is protecting again.

Oh, one thing: at first the mouse is disabled in rEFInd but you can enable it in the settings (which isn’t as end-user friendly I have to say, you need to be a bit comfortable in editing config-files)

For number 3 I can help. i just recently installed gentoo on my machine (chrooted from my main os so didnt use the live installation cd)

I use arch, and I have LVM on LUKS setup. (Complicated from Gentoo Installation Guide pov) I would agree with you that UEFI article was not super helpful. I set up UEFI from reading up http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ I definitely recommend that site and boot manager. You need to do some configuring yourself, but after that it is very easy to add boot parameters and whatnot. I can describe my exact setup if you want.

If you want to hibernate or are running long running memory hog programs (such as rendering) I suggest hving at least a swap file. If not, then it isnt really neccessary.

The default installation does not have things like LUKS, LVM, btrfs built in to the kernel so be sure to read each article before using those features.

You could try installing a boot manager that knows how to wait for USB drives, such as rEFInd: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind

If you want to keep grub, you can have rEFInd call grub - it's not either/or.

I can recommend to take a look at rEFInd, it's the best solution for multiboot systems out there. You can follow the installation steps on the website. Use your Arch boot USB/CD you've used to install Arch, create a EFI boot partition (see Arch Wiki install guide), unzip the downloaded rEFInd .zip file and run the installer. It'll detect the EFI boot partition and sets it as default.

Not sure I completely understand your problem.

You can boot W10 using EFI but not using Solus own boot manager, correct?

What is your partition/bootloader setup?

Are you using a single EFI system partition (ESP) for W10 and Solus or do they each have their own ESP?

If W10 and Solus share an ESP, W10 should show up as an entry in Solus boot manager. You can try running sudo clr-boot-manager update in a terminal and see if that helps.

AFAIK there's no way to boot Windows using Solus boot manager, if W10 and Solus each have their own ESP. You will have to use EFI to boot Windows or install rEFInd

Edit: Rereading your post I may have misunderstood and you are not able to boot W10 at all. In which case I really don't know how to help, sorry.

As long as you didn't overwrite your W10 ESP it should show up in your EFI boot menu as "Windows Boot Manager" or something similar.

If you have a Windows entry but it doesn't boot W10, have you checked that you didn't accidentally overwrite your W10 install when you installed Solus?

I have a mid 2010 MacBook Pro and I have problems getting a lot of distros to even boot their installer. The good new is that, aside from some of the very new ones, mine is one of the most difficult models to deal with so you should have a better time than I have. Linux Mint (not may favorite distro) installs really nice and plays pretty well with Macs. If you are dual booting I recommend avoiding suspend as Mac OS can see Linux resuming from suspend as an attack and it responds aggressively indeed (it not only destroyed my Linux partition, the only thing left was a recovery partition). I had Arch running for a while, but it was unstable as hell. I'm planning on reinstalling Mint tomorrow. I was also able to get Sabayon installed, but there were issues with Dolphin so I moved on. Kubuntu installed but I ran into immediate problems. The only thing I never got working correctly in Mint was the wifi. I was only using it at my desk where I had an ethernet connection available so I really didn't try very hard.

The other possibility is for you to use rEFInd to boot your system.

I'd definitely install Arch on the SSD. Every OS should be installed on a SSD. The speed boost compared to a normal HDD is huge like almost 4x times faster. It also simplifies the configuration since you don't have to deal with the same UUID for the device with different partitions on it. There are also a lot of other advantages when using this method e.g. backup/image creation, cleaner filesystem type separation and so on.

If you've installed Windows via UEFI I can highly recommend to use the awesome rEFInd project as boot manager. It automatically detects all installed UEFI OS on your system. The configuration file is uses a clean and simple syntax, it is also able to boot legacy installed systems and provides many config features including themes.

Assuming your computer uses UEFI;

It's a wall of text and a little technical, however it'll break the enigma of what's going on.

Dude also authored a pretty sweet utility/bootloader (manager) called rEFInd that's pretty fantastic

+1 for rEFInd

Never was able to get freebsd running on my test laptop, but I dual boot macOS and linux on my macbook and windows and a few different linuxes on my test box all using rEFInd. Looks good (with the right theme) and works good.

I went through the same process. The main problem is Apple's "rootless mode"--that is, SIP. You have to do some extra config to make reFind work (if you can get it to work at all); this guy has all the detail you'll need.

But I never got everything to work. Supposedly later versions of MacOS (e.g., Sierra) make this even more difficult. It's one of the reasons I finally sold my Macbook Pro and moved to Linux on a Thinkpad--I'm much happier, and don't ever have to deal with MacOS dual-boot bullshit. I love Mac, but I can say for certainty that Apple does not ever want to help you install Linux on an Apple machine.

Have you tried rEFInd? I've only ever successfully installed any other OS on a Mac after installing rEFInd. I suspect that Grub isn't working with your EFI System Partition properly, and that's what's causing the issue.

If you do try rEFInd, don't check the "install a bootloader" option in the Ubuntu installer.

I'm not sure what the issues are with Burg. But as for alternatives...

Any chance your computer supports UEFI?

If so, then I'd recommend rEFInd.

Of course, even if your computer supports UEFI, to use a UEFI boot manager, you'll need to have installed Ubuntu in UEFI mode, and not in compatibility mode. If you installed in compatibility mode, you'd have to reinstall fresh in UEFI mode in order to use a UEFI boot manager, such as rEFInd.

I used to run Linux on a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and even an iMac. For the most part, they all worked alright, but there were a few small issues that needed to be tweaked. For example, the wireless and display needed proprietary drivers installed for them to work properly.

You can dual boot using something like rEFInd, but I found it easier just to do a single boot and run Mac OS on an external disk when needed.

Just bear in mind that it's not going to run perfectly. You're going to run into some issues here and there (sometimes my laptop wouldn't wake from sleep, and the trackpad driver was awful), but it'll do the job fine enough.

In the end, I stopped using macs altogether and just went with a ThinkPad.

Good luck!

If you want to install Ubuntu alongside with OS X I would suggest you to replace your bootmanager with rEFInd. Taking backups of your original settings etc would be a good idea. http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ If you are using OSX 10.11 aka El Capitan you may have to disable new SIP feature to succesfully install Linux (atleast I had to). http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/sip.html Nothing too tricky and you're installing Ubuntu in no time. Some help if you are using Yosemite. Could also apply to El Capitan. http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/yosemite.html

rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) might be able to do something similar to that. This page http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/configfile.html has some relevant info in the "Adjusting the Default Boot Option" chapter.

I'm also by no means a Mac guy, but I've got a job that assigns me Macbooks that I always run Linux on. In my experience the pain points are the integrated peripherals (mostly the touchpad), the internal sensors to detect lid open/close events, and the wifi adapter. The best thing you can do avoid problems with these is use the newest distribution and kernel releases available.

You're not dealing with a brand new device, and this will no doubt make it easier for you, although you'll still be well served by up to date software.

I suggest Ubuntu 15.04 or 15.10. It's well supported and there's quite a bit of documentation out there from people doing the same thing as you.

Alternately, for compatibility with my corporate VPN I need to run Ubuntu 14.04. It doesn't work out of the box but once I manually install the current kernel (packaged for Ubuntu from here) and the proprietary driver for the wifi card it runs almost without issue. 14.04 benefits from being an LTS release and having waaay more available documentation. Note that with 14.04 you still need to use the ISO packaged for MAC in order for it to boot. They seem to have done away with this in newer releases.

Use refind as a boot loader. It's really easy to install and works flawlessly.

What are you talking about? It's still plenty capable of doing the job, just because it's a legacy application that's not in active development doesn't just mean it stops working all of a sudden. As a matter of fact, in the second link Google returned me (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) you can see for yourself that it's currently under development under a new name, rEFInd - personally I don't really give much of a shit either way as I'm not likely to get myself into any kinds of messes like this OP did with my system setup not to mention I know how to fix it. All of these things are pretty much fundamental basic elements of the system architecture - tools that work to alter something as simple as EFI partition maps and volume startup structure exist as they are and will only become "dead" once they have no effect on Apple computers because OS X isn't a traditionally unix-based operating system anymore or has been altered to an effect as to change things that have been the same for a good while.

Your running into the magic of EFI, as opposed to anything HP is doing. Check your bios to seee if you can set EFI boot order.

Also, I've had good luck dual booting windows 10 and ubutnu on my Asus using this: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

I own a MacBook and Linux is running there just fine. Just make some free space on your machine, install http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ and off you go. I used Antergos (arch fan) and Fedora and was ready in just about 30 Minutes, including reading into the topic, preperation and installation.

If you are really scared, just buy an external USB3.0 harddrive and boot from it – its super easy i've tested dozen of Linux distributions that way.

Fedora is quite friendly, as it has an easy graphical installer and IIRC, doesn't require a boot manager such as rEFInd to use it on a mac , where as other distros do.

First off, install rEFInd. Second, make a bootable USB with something like UNetbootin or Win32DiskImager. Third, start up Fedora Live USB and resize your OSX partition to give yourself the amount of space you'd like for Fedora. It's probably a good idea to boot into OSX to make sure the resizing went all right. Fourth, install Fedora on newly created free space.

You may or may not run into some driver issues. If you do, you're going to have to use some Googlefu to get the information you need. Just so you know, I've tried installing Fedora on my mid-2012 MacBook Pro and it did not go so well. The newer models may not have the same problems as mine. I ended up going with LMDE 2. It's the only thing that works for me without any additional tinkering after install.

If you severely mess up this process and lose access to both Fedora and OSX, always remember that you can Apple+R while powering on to boot into Internet recovery. You shouldn't have to do that, but things happen. Be sure to carefully read everything that you're doing.

Are you attempting to install only Debian? Or dual boot with OS X?

If you are dual booting (which I recommed) use Boot Camp to partition the drive for Windows. Then boot via the Debian USB (Note: you will need a utility to convert the ISO to USB, OS X should tools exist, such as Drive Utility). Once the install is finished then you might need to install rEFInd (rEFIt was basically replaced by rEFInd) via it's instructions. (Jessie has better EFI support and might work fine, I've only done Wheezy on an old Macbook 2007)

If you are installing only Debian you'd need to convert the ISO to USB. Boot it via the Mac Startup Keys (you might need a rEFIed USB stick, see below). Remove OS X completely during the install, by using the full drive. Once install is complete, if the system doesn't boot at all, you'd need to install rEFInd by booting into the Debian install with a rEFInd USB stick (see below).

You probably want to make a standalone rEFInd USB, downloadable here , just for the sake of ensuring you can find the Debian install.

It's important to note, the dual boot option is your best bet for keeping the machine in a usable state. Something you really want if you are new to this. Likewise, be sure to note the Mac Startup keys. If you have a new enough MacBook Air this will allow you to get to Network Recovery. Which will be the fastest option for restoring your MBA to a working computer.

Another option to consider, if you have a spare USB HDD or large enough USB Stick, you can also create a recovery drive to boot your Mac.

I dont mind killing the USB, I used to buy 3 at a time and toss them after each reload. Not the Extremes, but cheaper USBs.

I dont Install OSX to the usb i install ubuntu, with the drive encrypted.

I use REFIND to boot to the USB. http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Regarding the bootloader, try rEFInd. It's painless, done quickly and saves you a ton of trouble with the boot loader. I cannot comment on Gentoo specifically, but for Ubuntu it works magic. You'd need grub with USE=efi-64, I imagine.

The biggest issue with Macs booting Linux is probably the EFI. Distros are getting better at supporting this out of the box, but sometimes it is still necessary to use a custom EFI bootloader, like rEFInd.

(I successfully triple-booted OSX, Windows & Linux on my Macbook Pro for ages using rEFIt, which rEFInd's predecessor.)

It all depends on your hardware which can vary in Macbooks. There are a number of known quirks using Linux on a Macbook. I am dual-booting Fedora 20 on a 2014 Macbook Pro. For me, Retina display issues are the most annoying.

• Some distros may not ship with the firmware needed for your Wi-Fi to function. You may have to sideload a third-party package, or futz around with fwcutter to get Wi-Fi working.
• Some distros cannot chainload OSX from Grub2. One can hold the Option hotkey to boot OSX from rEFInd boot loader at startup.
• Some desktop environments will lack high-resolution artifacts to work well with Retina displays.
• Hot-plugging thunderbolt adapters does not work. Some adapters will only work if you boot with that adapter connected (e.g. wired network), while others may not work at all (e.g. external display/projector adapter).
• Newer Facetime HD webcams do not work at all (no driver).

You'll need rEFInd to dual-boot. As far as I could tell, the newest boot camp only supports Windows installations, so it won't really help you.

The Arch wiki has the most comprehensive documentation on known Macbook issues. Much of that is still relevant even if you are not using Arch.

Well, first I would stick to 12.10 or later, since their kernel versions support EFISTUB (which will be handy once you get it installed).

Use rEFInd to select and boot from the USB drive. Or, try an actual CD instead; in my experience Macs' BIOS emulator is finicky about booting from USB.

I also have a 3,1. I don't remember what all I tried, but what did end up working was doing a fresh install of OS X (Snow Leopard) and installing rEFInd from OS X per the website, then installing Linux from a normal 64-bit ISO.

The trackpad driver can be a bit jerky compared to OS X. A patch in the 3.15 kernel helps with this but if you're running something with an older kernel you can compile a patched version of the driver yourself by following these instructions. This won't install the patched driver permanently but that's just a matter of finding and overwriting the kernel version of the appletouch.ko file with the version you compile. (On the downside, you'll need to do this every time you upgrade the kernel.)

It is possible; essentially you would need to set up an EFI bootloader for Linux, and store it on an HFS+ partition at the path /EFI/boot/bootx64.efi. This would cause it to show up in the Mac's boot manager as "EFI Boot." Unfortunately there is no straight-shot guide that I know of which covers this, so you would need to piece it together yourself.

The good news is, rEFInd (an up to date fork of rEFIt) is fantastic. It's good to be scrutinizing, but there's no reason to be worried about rEFInd causing any problems for you. Worst case, resetting your NVRAM will return your Mac to its factory boot settings.

I had the same problem. I think its mac spesific.

Solution 1:

Using the rEFIt or rEFInd boot loader. I think rEFInd is best.

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Solution 2:

Booting from a CD.

The best computer to run Linux on is a Macbook Pro, which you already have. If you don't want to completely remove OSX you can dual boot with rEFInd. That is what I do.

I have some good experience with this, having gone through various Macs and god knows how many Linux distributions all while having to accommodate Windows at the same time.

As others have stated, you need make sure your hybrid MBR is configured for the necessary partitions, as it was probably overwritten. You can do this using gdisk. Assuming you didn't use any special procedure to install Windows in EFI mode, your Windows partition will need to be accessible with the MBR. You will also need a BIOS bootloader installed; If Microsoft's was overwritten when you partitioned your disk, then you can use GRUB as a replacement or until you repair it from Windows.

Debian can be booted either from the MBR or the GPT depending on whether it was installed with a BIOS bootloader or EFI bootloader. The kernel that is bundled with Debian 7.4 is complied with the EFISTUB feature built in, which means that rEFInd will allow you to boot into Debian as it exists now. You will need to give rEFInd an EFI driver to allow it to access your Debian partition.

I would recommend directing people to use rEFInd rather than rEFIt. If you look at the rEFIt page they even direct users to use rEFInd as rEFIt is no longer maintained.

http://refit.sourceforge.net/

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

your best bet for this is probably refind, which is available in the aur. I use it to dual boot, and in principle you can have as many distros as you like.

before you install install manjaro and are in the live usb, partition the disk using gparted (i think its on the manjaro live usb) so that you have a boot partition, a partition for manjaro, another for mint/ubuntu/whatever and then a swap if you want it. Then install manjaro. Once you boot back into your manjaro setup you can install refind from the aur and from what i remember it sorts everything out for you. Here is the website for it though. There's also loads of ways you can customise the appearance and the options for booting but before doing that I would just make sure everything works

Then you can put in your mint live usb and either boot to it from your bios or from the refind manager. Install mint on the spare partition and it should find the boot and swap partitions. Then when you next boot up it'll probably go to grub rather than refind. this is fine, you just need to install refind on your mint partition too. This is a bit different to arch based as its not in the official repo, but on that website there's instructions for ubuntu which worked with mint for me.

There is probably a way to do it just with grub, and this method may not be the most elegant, but it works.

>Now, I'd like to know if there are GUI softwares that allow to seamlessly choose which OS to boot when I start my laptop.

There are many GRUB alternatives, one I like is rEFInd. http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

https://askubuntu.com/questions/53686/alternative-to-grub

I recommend switching to EFI mode which is the modern way to boot dual or multi OS systems. If you can't then I'm pretty sure you can use rEFInd boot manager on legacy as well as EFI.

Article on legacy booting.

rEFInd

El problema me imagino que esta en grub que no entiende raid0 y no sabe como bootear windows. Se me ocurre es probar "Chain loading" https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Chain_002dloading.html o usar un boot manager alternativo como http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/.

To try refind:

xbps-install refind refind-install

To try out refind before installing, there is also a live usb with refind and also good for a rescue usb when booting goes bad: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html

Get "a USB flash drive image file" on the above page and just unzip then

dd if=refind-flashdrive-0.12.0.img of=/dev/sdx

It's called rEFInd. It's based off of rEFIt which is what Clover uses. I decided to use OpenCore instead of Clover after reading the reviews about it. So far I much prefer it over Clover. I posted my build on r/hackintosh here.

I'm currently using rEFInd as my bootloader, once it's set up it's fairly hard to get something to not boot using it, as long as you have an initramfs and kernel in /boot, or a kernel and initramfs in /boot/efi/EFI/distro-name.with the EFI system partition mounted on /boot/efi (so the EFI partition contains a folder named EFI, which contains the distro-name folder which contains the kernel and initramfs, with two other folders for refind also on the EFI partition)

so with a kernel and initramfs in /boot or /boot/efi/EFI/distro-name, with a simple setup (no lvm, no LUKS, or anything else that requires specific modules to load in order to boot) it should basically just boot.

Installing rEFInd is really easy as well, just run refind-install and it basically does just about everything for you (puts an entry in the bootloader, makes that entry the top priority, mounts the efi partition, copys all the required files to the required locations, etc).

I really like rEFInd because when you plug something in (like a bootable USB) it should just show up as an option to boot from immediately, so you don't have to go into the bios and change the boot order, I also think it looks much nicer compared to GRUB :)

&#x200B;

Here is a link

I got this problem installing grub-customiser recently. If you are using EFI you can create a bootable key with refind http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ and boot on Windows from that. If it works I can give you guidance to restore the grub.

Hmm, that’s odd changing CSM doesn’t have any effect. I still think rEFInd would be worth a shot. I only works in EFI in the sense that it requires an EFI system to run, but supposedly it can launch legacy (BIOS) systems. Take a look at the features here

sdb refers to the disk in its entirety. In the case of the bootloader, this means what used to be the MBR in legacy BIOS mode. There was a small area reserved at the beginning of the disk where the initial stage of the bootloader could be stored, usually just enough space for code to read the real bootloader. GPT retains some backwards compatibility with MBR, but if you're using EFI and GPT, it's better not to use it.

sdb2, in the case of the volume layout in the screenshot, refers to the EFI boot partition. This is where modern bootloaders store their stuff, adding an entry to the EFI letting it know it's there. When you hit the magic key at boot (vendor defined) it provides a menu allowing you to select the bootloader you want to use.

In most cases you'll want to use the EFI partition for your bootloader, as it's much simpler to work with. My recommendation is to look into rEFInd for managing your boot options. It is like a front end bootloader that works after the EFI has done it's magic and before any OS takes over, letting you choose which to boot.

Caveat: my memory of BIOS boot stuff is hazy, and my knowledge of EFI is limited. Learning new shit, and retaining it, gets harder with every passing year.

Further reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

You can use something like rEFInd to be the master bootx64.elf (file UEFI looks for to boot)

it can actively query the ESP on boot for changes(to find new OS bootloaders, kernelSTUBs, or additional drivers[not OS used, but RAID for example to find the drive with the OS]), along with other recovery utilities, or allow an entry to boot an iso off the harddrive if you need a liveOS.

The problem usually arises with GPT/pMBR/MBR drive tables combined with your particular UEFI implementation. The combinations possible makes things harder to get correct. Especially with pMBR booting in UEFI mode.

I'm going to assume you are using UEFI. UEFI can only search FAT partitions for executables. Put a small (256-512MB) FAT32 partition on your HDD and reinstall, this time selecting the new partition for the bootloader.

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If you want a nicer looking boot selection screen, look at rEFInd with a theme. It may be a hassle to setup without experience, but it is worth it for the polish.

If you're really upset about it.

Grab rEFIND or some alternate bootloader and use that. From the config file just set a timeout for macOS or windows to boot automatically.

Here's a link

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

You can, of course theme it beyond comic sans.

Refind has done the best job for me at finding bootable partitions. I haven't installed it from Windows yet, but it looks like you can do it with just the command line.

If all of these are installed for UEFI you might consider to use rEFInd, the configuration file is simple and rEFInd provides some really nice features. Runs on my desktop machine (Arch + 2x Win 7 multi boot) and MacBook Pro (Arch + macOS multi boot), automatically detected all OS without even touching the configuration file.

Did the following to install Windows 10 on my unsupported 2011 MacBook Pro

• Install Tuxera NTFS File Manager trial for Mac
• Download e.g. Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft
• Extract contents of ISO into your downloads folder
• Through Disk utility create a new partition for your Windows Install. Call it Windows
• While using Tuxera NTFS Manager format your newly created partition (Windows) to NTFS
• Copy contents from extracted Win ISO to partition as is
• Download rEFInd (EFI boot Manager) which is safe to use and install on either Mac itself (installer follows which does everything for you. You need to disable SIP though) or flash it on a external USB. Link
• Boot through rEFInd to the Windows partition which then loads the Windows installer. When choosing target partition, highlight your Windows NTFS partition created under MacOS. Don’t format or delete the partition, just click install which copies the files from the installer files and sets up the Windows OS.
• When asked to reboot, reboot and select the second Windows partition if possible. Incase the system Install was successful the Windows boot Manager will detect both your Install and the Windows installer, here you choose your new fresh Windows Install
• Last but not least Install the boot camp drivers of last supported version from Apple website

I might be wrong, but I believe the kernel needs to load a video module using early KMS https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_mode_setting in order to have higher resolutions available before starting a display server. The trouble is that you first need to load grub (or other) in order to load your kernel. So you can have high res splash screens, but not boot loaders.

You might also give refind http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/themes.html a shot, it has a lot more eye candy features. Refind seems to be limited to what resolution is available to your bios firmware, so it can go as high as whatever that is. Cheers

>When I did the erase disk and install it gives you the message for the changes for the drive, it created a 500mb partition named ESP, if it was space wouldn't it created a big partition?

make sure it has a mount point, ive seen some installers leave this out

500MB is the usual config.

If your not dual/triple/quad booting it doesn't really buy you much. Unless your adding removing OS's on the regular.

in terms of MBR vs GPT.

MBR usable space is limited to 2TB If you have messed around with windows installs, you may remember the whole Primary/Logical partition limitation. This isn't a limitation on MBR.

Heres a good site to check out. Cool utility that adds to UEFI, something to check out when you learn more, but there is a plethora of knowledge on UEFI in there(and some manufacturer differences which you may be experiencing)

That is a good plan.

Keep in mind that if you leave your /home partition intact between different distros, to rename your .whatever.conf files in your home folder(you can get away with using symbolic links, but thats a lesson for the future) it can prevent the Xserver/whatever-else from loading right.

These .files are hidden from normal view, can be viewed in the file manager by selecting hidden files in one of the drop down, sometimes ctrl+H or ls:

ls -a

ESP partitions(atm machine) advantage is dependent on your motherboard unfortunately. Have some UEFI love

Mark this as a reference for the future

You need to find yourself a guide specific to installing Linux on a Mac.

Macs might contain Intel chips nowadays but they're not "just another PC". You can't wipe OS X and just install Windows or Linux. The Mac EFI (BIOS) needs to be prepared and that's usually done via the Boot Camp Assistant app in OS X. I'm not sure if something like rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) can be used to switch/prepare the Mac's EFI instead of Boot Camp, but I suspect if you visit its website you'll find a guide to getting Linux onto a Mac.

To reiterate, because I'll bet you don't believe me: You can't just install Linux straight onto a Mac as you would a PC. It doesn't work that way.

The easiest way is to just run the refind-install script again.

Here is a guide to make refind boot again for both Linux OS X and Windows.

Edit: my experience is that it's easier to get it to boot from refind when installing from OS X.

Once you uninstall rEFIt and get your machine booting again you should probably use rEFInd instead. rEFIt is deprecated and the fork rEFInd is much more well maintained.

I've used an old MacBook (white) as a server for a short period of time. I now have a Mac Mini that I like very much. A few points that might be helpful:

• If you get OS X Server, there isn't much documentation, and it can sometimes be difficult to find answers at the Apple Support Communities.
• Similarly, make sure that the OS X Server app is compatible with the OS version that you're running.
• In my experience, the laptop worked well as an iTunes server and a backup server.
• If you want to install Linux on the old MacBook, then I found rEFInd to be very helpful. I ended up installing ElementaryOS on my old MacBook.

You can use refind, a bootloader: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ It's easy to install it in linux and it could save you from troubles. I'm a distro-hopper and always have between 5 and 10 operating systems on my SSD. Refind is a safety net for any experiments in installing linux - even after deleting grub, you can use the refind bootloader. I never destroyed Windows' bootloader in the last year (I did it in the past, though), so, I guess the linux world made some progress in the installation area; but even if I would destroy it, I could acces my Windows OS by refind.

You have a few different options.

Either you could use OSX own bootloader: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro11,x#Bootloader

Or you can use something like rEFInd: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Or what i use, efibootmgr: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro11-1/utopic#A1.1._Setting_up_efibootmgr Follow the 'Grub tuning' section aswell so you get the grub menu to appear. Also to make a boot entry for osx type the following into '/etc/grub.d/40_custom' and run 'update-grub'

menuentry "Mac OSX" { exit }

I used the metod described in the official website, for Ubuntu-based distro:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rodsmith/refind sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install refind

which worked flawlessly, if it doesn't you might try

sudo efibootmgr

and use "-o" to set the boot order

Problem I encountered: after loading Windows 10 first time the Ubuntu entry in UEFI gets erased so you stuck with loading Windows by default each time.

In process, I reinstalled Ubuntu three times thinking I messed up in the installation, each time same result, tried boot-repair tool but guess what - it didn't start, it was complaining about missing module 'gi' (python stuff), almost gave up on it.

Yesterday I found rEFInd Boot Manager so I copied the ISO image to my USB stick and plugged it and voila, on boot the reFInd starts and let me choose between Windows and Ubuntu.

So I am not sure why this happened to me, is it Windows fault or Motherboard, anyway this is my setup:

• Both the OS'es were installed on separate hard drives (Windows was installed first)
• MOBO: ASRock P75 Pro.

Link you might find useful: Ubuntu Wiki UEFI Page

Damned UEFI

No one has mentioned it yet so I will...

You can dual boot with ReFind which will give a start screen pre-OS-boot from which to choose OS. Works really well, had it on my 2008 macbook right up until the motherboard died. You get to keep OS X and add as many other OSes as you have HD space for, planning in advance a little bit. This wold allow you TRIPLE boot with Windows too, if you are a masochist or gamer.

Two things with Linux/Ubunu on a white macbook:
1. Trackpad is less than stellar. Actually a bit frustrating to use. Get a micro-mouse.
2. You may get a red light emitting from the audio port. You can turn this off with from the command line before it melts the thing it's aimed at.

1. Mac OS X is basically just ~~your Linux distro of choice~~ BSD with a custom desktop interface.
2. No, yes, and no.
3. Yes, and the difference is monumental. You can expect your computer to feel twice as fast in day-to-day use.
4. You can get Mini Displayport to either VGA or DVI adapters from Apple, Amazon or Monoprice.
5. Yes and yes. Though if you install Linux you shouldn't use GRUB and instead use this.
6. Dual booting is easy, and although I've never triple-booted on a Mac, it shouldn't be too much more difficult. It's basically the same as multi-booting any other computer, except for one small thing: do any partitioning ONLY in OS X. If you try it in Windows or Linux, that may break some things.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

I've done it, and love running Mint native on the MBP.

• download rEFInd
• make a boot CD or USB with rEFInd
• boot the MBP with rEFInd, and install rEFInd
• boot the MBP with Mint DVD or USB, install Mint

if rEFInd doesn't work on to 2009 MBP, you may need to use rEFIt

Edit: BC will always be easiest but it could be worth a look at this: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

The reason everyone keeps pointing you in the same direction is because it is your best bet.

Yes apple machines are Intel PC's but the boot loader is very specific to Apple and Bootcamp is the way to dual boot. You will also need the driver pack and the easiest way to get it is via bootcamp.

Reduce the OSX partition until you've got about 10-20% free space.

Now boot into windows and set it as your default.

Now just forget about OSX being there.

the problem is with Apple's implementation of EFI. I've been using rEFInd for a while now and it's awesome.
I've actually been holding off on 10.11 until there were more reports about [rEFInd compatibility with El Capitan](www.rodsbooks.com/refind/sip.html), looks like it's figured out.

Sorry, I should've read your post more carefully; missed a couple details.

I'm guessing you're running El Capitan, in which case the reason you couldn't edit Boot Camp Assistant's Info.plist is due to its System Integrity Protection feature. You will need to temporarily disable that.

As for the dual hard drives, you'll need to stop once you get to the "Enabling Windows Boot Option" section, and instead install rEFInd to use as an alternate boot manager. Again, Rootless will need to be disabled to set that up.

If I remember correctly, you can boot BIOS OSs with REFIND Iinstall Debian alongside OS X as normal, then boot into Debian, reinstall grub

grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck --debug --force /dev/sdaX

(target=i386-pc should install in BIOS/pc mode) then install refind either in Debian or OS X (may be easier installing in OS X, especially if you want to dual boot frequently to os x)