Other interesting Mac alternatives to PLoP Boot Manager are rEFInd (Free, Open Source), GRUB4DOS and WINGRUB (Free, Open Source), Gag (Free, Open Source) and rEFIt (Free, Open Source). The list of alternatives was last updated Nov 8, 2019. PLoP Boot Manager info, screenshots & reviews Alternatives to PLoP Boot Manager. Note: These instructions are for Mac models with 64 bit EFI firmware. In other words, if your Mac has Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) or a newer version OS X (macOS) installed, then you can use these instructions. Instead of using rEFInd, you can use the Startup Manager to boot most Linux distributions. The Startup Manager is contained in the the.
REFInd is a boot manager which allows you to boot multiple operating systems from internal or external hard drives. REFInd automatically detects EFI bootloaders and shows a graphical interface allowing the user to select which operating system they want to start.
A next-generation open source rEFIt UEFI boot manager for Linux, Windows and Mac machines
What's new in rEFInd 0.9.2:
- Soon after releasing 0.9.1, I started receiving bug reports about problems with it and Shim 0.8. (See this thread for one such report.) It turns out that the problem was not a new bug in rEFInd, but rather a change from Shim 0.7 to Shim 0.8 that made it next to useless with rEFInd. Specifically, Shim 0.8 now de-registers itself from the EFI after a follow-on program launches another one. This is done to avoid problems in a boot path in which Shim launches fallback.efi, which in turn launches another Shim. This creates a new problem, though: rEFInd can validate just one binary before it's 'cut off' from Shim. Since rEFInd's drivers are binaries, if you use a single driver, that means that you won't be able to launch anything that requires validation via Shim. I quickly discovered a workaround, which I've implemented in this release. I consider this a 'band-aid' patch, though, because it relies on a quirk of Shim's logic to bypass its de-registration. As such, the workaround in this release may break with a future Shim. A true fix will take longer to develop. I want to release this workaround version to head off further problems in the near term, though. This version also introduces a new feature, which is also Shim-related: Since version 0.7, Shim has supported launching binaries other than grubx64.efi by passing them on the command line. (Actually, Shim 0.4 supported this, but it required a broken path specification.) I've added support for this feature to install.sh: Adding the --keepname option to install.sh causes the script to preserve rEFInd's regular filename and to register the approprirate follow-on parameters to have Shim launch rEFInd by that name. This works, but is likely to be more delicate than using the default Shim follow-on name of grubx64.efi. The advantage, of course, is that rEFInd needn't 'lie' about its name, which makes for less confusion in filenames. For the moment, the RPM and Debian packages I build do not use this new naming feature, since I can't be sure what version of Shim might be picked up. These changes do not affect users who do not use Secure Boot.
Refind For Mac Install Download
Read the full changelogrEFInd is an open source boot manager or boot loader that supports Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It’s a fork of the well known rEFIt boot manager, but engineered to support UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface)-based machines.
The application lets users to manually edit and set boot-time options, try Live operating systems that are distributed on bootable CD discs or USB flash drives, launch Linux 3.3.0 and later kernels that are built with EFI stub loader support.
Features at a glance
Key features include support for Secure Boot, which depends on a separate PreLoader or shim program, ability to launch MS Windows and Macintosh recovery utilities, as well as third-party EFI programs like an EFI shell.
When compared with rEFIt, we can immediately notice that rEFInd is able to better handle UEFI-based machines that contain multiple bootloaders and automatically detects installed EFI boot managers. In addition, it provides both text-mode and graphical boot prompts.
Refind For Mac
In more technical terms, the application features support for EFI 1.x and UEFI 2.x machines, as well as both PCs and Mac platforms. It also supports a wide range of file systems, including EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, ReiserFS, ISO-9660, and HFS+.
Another interesting feature is the ability to reboot into the firmware setup utility of specific UEFIs. Furthermore, the application supports maintenance-free Linux kernel updates, which means that there no need to manually configure certain boot parameters after a kernel update.
Conclusions
All in all, rEFInd is yet another great UEFI boot loader, designed as a drop-in replacement for the GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) software. It’s somehow similar to the gummiboot boot manager, but it includes even more features, multiple configuration options, as well as support for numerous filesystems and operating systems. It is navigable with the keyboard and supports custom background images.
Filed under
rEFInd was reviewed by Marius NestorRefind For Mac
rEFInd 0.9.2
add to watchlistsend us an updateRefind For Mac M1
- runs on:
- Linux
- main category:
- System
- developer:
- visit homepage