Episode: 437
Title: HPR0437: refit
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0437/hpr0437.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 20:31:55

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This is Skirlett broadcasting and podcasting from the top of the world famous Hawaiian Space
Needle Tower in lovely mystical Hawaii under a brilliant, brilliant, dare I say full moon
sky. This is Hacker Public Radio, word the internet massive. I'm Skirlett co-host of the podcast
Fedora Reloaded and so obviously I run a lot of Fedora myself. I actually have two computers,
one that boots only exclusively into Fedora, but for classes and for a lot of my work as a
web and graphics designer I use Mac OSX. For a while I just used two computers, one booting into
Fedora 10 and one booting into Mac OSX. But lately I've been wanting to have both operating systems
on the same machine without having to lug around to laptops that got old. So the answer was to
dual boot Mac OSX and Fedora on the same laptop and how does she do this? Well in any brand of
computer but Apple you install grub and when you start the computer you'd get a menu that lets
you boot into Windows or Linux. Intel Apple computers use EFI and has a shell that you can use to
interact with it. There are about three different groups doing different things with EFI.
Intel who developed it. TN Core trying to come up with the free version of EFI or EFI shell.
And R-E-F-I-T pronounced refit I think on sourceforage.net. A project which actually does implement an EFI
hack that lets you choose what system you want to boot on your Macintosh computer. A lot of people
have problems with EFI in terms of not being free in open software or firmware. I have problems with
EFI because I can't take a USB thumb drive and boot Linux off of it like you might be able to
with your non Apple computer. Refit doesn't fix this unfortunately but it does at least add support
for the major Linux file systems. Installation is easy. Go to refit.sourceforage.net and download
the installation package on Mac OS. Open it up. Double click on the installer and in 15 seconds you
have refit installed. So since you're doing this for a dual boot system go to your utilities folder
and open up boot camp and partition the drive into partitions. The first for Mac OS X and the
second for what it thinks will be Windows. Before doing this you should just in case backup all
your data. During installation click the customize button and enable all the Linux file system support.
After you've repartitioned you can reboot just pop in your Linux install CD and one of the first
things you'll see is your refit screen. The refit screen is basically just intercepting your boot
process a lot more powerful than just holding down the option key during boot apps since that
doesn't ever really recognize Linux file systems. Install Linux as you normally would. Now when refit
comes up you'll have an Apple logo and a penguin logo. Use the arrow keys to switch from one to
the other. Hit return and you boot into your OS of choice. If you don't choose anything for 20 seconds
or so it defaults to the first partition which in most cases is OS X. That's it refit. Have a good
time remember to back up and thanks for listening to hacker publicly. Thank you for listening to
hacker publicly radio. HPR is sponsored by Carol.net so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-T for all of your team.