Had anyone here used rEFIT and if so, why?

DRE

DRE

Well-known member
I'm buying my first mac and would like to be able to boot into windows and linux. I read that boot camp won't let me have more than 2 operating systems due to it not allowing more than 3 partitions. The only other solution I saw was rEFIt. Is this relatively easy to set up and have any of you had any problems with it? Which OS do you use the most? I probably wouldn't use linux much.
 
Boot camp is just a disk partitioning tool. You don't even really need to use it. You could just partition your disks using the Disk Utility.

Refit is a great boot loader. This just allows you to choose which OS you want to boot into. With configurable options such as choosing the default OS, time to auto selection etc.

So yeah. Forget boot camp, partition your disks, install refit, boot to cd and install Linux and or Windows and any other OS you like and choose which one to boot into via refit on start up.

To answer the other part of your question. If I bought a Mac I'd probably boot it to Windows most of the time.
 
Yorick said:
To answer the other part of your question. If I bought a Mac I'd probably boot it to Windows most of the time.
Click to expand...

I have a mac since 4 years now and thought the same, before I bought it.

And guess what? Last time I booted into windows happened more than 1 year ago. Mac is a perfect machine for software developing and even easier if you use it together with Linux servers.
 
HWS said:
I have a mac since 4 years now and thought the same, before I bought it.

And guess what? Last time I booted into windows happened more than 1 year ago. Mac is a perfect machine for software developing and even easier if you use it together with Linux servers.
Click to expand...
Agreed. I use windows for only three things' MS Visio, MS project and a few IBM engineering tools that only run under Windows. Other than that, Windows is rubbish.
 
Get VirtualBox, it is free and does the same thing, and performance is pretty decent. You will also find allot of images already done for Linux distributions for that, though some have VMWare images as well...

Virtual machines isn't something you should to for day to day use though, I would recommend sticking with the OS you need on day to day, and run the others as virtual machines.
 
8thos said:
Dude this looks impressive: http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/overview.html

Is there a guide that shows you how to run all three? The website only shows Windows and Mac.
Click to expand...
Installing Linux in a VM is pretty much the exact same thing as installing Windows in a VM. Just using a different disc/file to install from. You could install as many as you like in the same manner.

Also FWIW I dual boot Windows 7 myself - but also have VMware Fusion, which lets me run the Bootcamp partition from a VM. I can either boot into Windows separately or run it as a VM inside OS X.. best of both worlds. And yes I use rEFIt.
 
I actually changed away from VMware Fusion due to how buggy the latest version is, and got Parallels instead, which is much nicer and far more feature rich. You have a lot more control with Parallels over which area you want running fastest.

Also be aware, 8Gb RAM will NOT be sufficient to run dual OS, like many advertise. Just starting Lion + Win7 is nearly 7 - 8Gb RAM, which leaves you nothing left for programs. 16Gb is the minimum you want if running dual OS, from experience.
 
8thos said:
The only other solution I saw was rEFIt. Is this relatively easy to set up and have any of you had any problems with it?
Click to expand...
It is very easy to get set up and it works fine. And the price is really attractive, when you start comparing the prices on the commercially available virtual desktop software.

Which OS do you use the most? I probably wouldn't use linux much.
Click to expand...
You just might surprise yourself. The iMac I am typing this on runs Linux 100% of the time. As do the two PCs sitting behind me. As well as my laptop. I purchased this iMac because I wanted away from Windows. And I didn't particularly care for OS X. I tried a Windows install in Parallels, but it was Windows I was trying to get away from, so this machine went unused for a few years. I used rEFIt and installed a Linux distro on the machine and it started getting more use. Back at the start of the new year, I moved it here, into my home office, wiped the drive and installed SolusOS on it. Since that time, I had to shut the machine off once to add some RAM and we had a power outage a couple months back. The machine has only been re-booted those two times, in the last 6 months. It's become my daily, go-to machine.

So don't write Linux off until you've used it for a bit. You may very well find yourself using a lot more than you think. ;)
 
Anthony Parsons said:
Also be aware, 8Gb RAM will NOT be sufficient to run dual OS, like many advertise. Just starting Lion + Win7 is nearly 7 - 8Gb RAM, which leaves you nothing left for programs. 16Gb is the minimum you want if running dual OS, from experience.
Click to expand...
You can choose how much memory to allocate to each VM. With 8gb I only assign 3gb to Windows 7 and have had no problem running both systems smoothly w/ intensive apps running on OS X and some casual apps on Windows.
 
Mike54 said:
Back at the start of the new year, I moved it here, into my home office, wiped the drive and installed SolusOS on it.
Click to expand...
Not heard of that Distro before, and being too lazy to Google it - why do you prefer this distro to others? What's its benefits over something more "mainstream" like Ubuntu?
 
Yorick said:
Not heard of that Distro before, and being too lazy to Google it - why do you prefer this distro to others? What's its benefits over something more "mainstream" like Ubuntu?
Click to expand...
Sorry to be so late in replying.

Let me see, where to start? SolusOS is based on Debian Stable (SolusOS 1.1 = Squeeze and SolusOS 2 = Wheezy), but the lead developer (Ikey Doherty) is also maintaining repos with updated software applications. It allows users to run a rock-solid distro, but use current applications with it. I'm running Firefox and Thunderbird 13 and LibreOffice 3.5.4-2, for example. Ikey is now creating SolusOS Community Repositories, which is taking Ubuntu's PPA concept to the next level - SolusOS users will be able to register an account on the SCR, upload a source for a Debian package, after which the SCR will build the package and then provide it in that user's own repository. The system will allow users to distribute their own packages, or help the devs with packaging by backporting or making other packages available. Imagine providing a source package and then having the SolusOS servers build it for either the SolusOS 1 or SolusOS 2 architecture and populate your repository for you. What I really like is how Solus OS 2 is using what is now called the Gnome Classic Desktop Environment (not fallback mode) that is virtually indistinguishable from Gnome 2. Where Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome Shell and MATE is a fork of Gnome 2.32, the Gnome Classic DE is patching the traditional Gnome components to work just as they would have in Gnome 2. At idle, I am regularly seeing SolusOS 2 using between 150 and 160 MB of RAM, whereas Mint installs running Cinnamon were commonly using over double that number. For a Linux user who wants to avoid the Shell, this Gnome Classic DE is a delight. Who needs to adapt to the Shell or Ubuntu's Unity (which is a mess, in my not-so-humble opinion), when you can still get the Gnome 2 look and feel? I really could go on and on, but these are some of the highlights that are attracting people to SolusOS.

At the rate SolusOS is attracting new users, it is soon going to be redefining "mainstream".
 
Anthony Parsons said:
I actually changed away from VMware Fusion due to how buggy the latest version is, and got Parallels instead, which is much nicer and far more feature rich. You have a lot more control with Parallels over which area you want running fastest.

Also be aware, 8Gb RAM will NOT be sufficient to run dual OS, like many advertise. Just starting Lion + Win7 is nearly 7 - 8Gb RAM, which leaves you nothing left for programs. 16Gb is the minimum you want if running dual OS, from experience.
Click to expand...
So to run os at a time 4gb of ram is ok but i need to upgrade to at least 16 gb to dual boot windows and mac osx? Wtf?
 
8thos said:
So to run os at a time 4gb of ram is ok but i need to upgrade to at least 16 gb to dual boot windows and mac osx? Wtf?
Click to expand...
I would expect that is in the context of running the second OS in a virtual machine.

In which case you'd need enough RAM to run Mac OS X at the same time as needing enough RAM to also run Windows.

4GB of RAM is sufficient to run each OS independently.
 
Jeremy P said:
You can choose how much memory to allocate to each VM. With 8gb I only assign 3gb to Windows 7 and have had no problem running both systems smoothly w/ intensive apps running on OS X and some casual apps on Windows.
Click to expand...
I have the base rMBP with 8GB and thinking of using Parallels and put Win7 on it. I only use Win 7 a few times a month for things like Quicken/Quickbook.
I keep hearing about 8GB ram is not enough for VM and there is no definite answer.
 
It works absolutely fine for me and I only have 8GB RAM. Running OS X 10.8 and Windows 7, with 3GB allocated to run Win7. If anyone thinks otherwise they don't know what they're talking about or are using resource-intensive apps on both OSs simultaneously.

Yeah, if you have more memory available, your OS is going to make use of it, it'd be pointless if it didn't.. but even Mountain Lion only has 2GB memory as a system requirement. Win7 only has 1GB memory requirement. You could get away running both simultaneously on 4GB (I've done that too), but will probably have some performance problems. 8GB is plenty.
 
With my previous mac I actually used rEFIt and Parallels. I could run Linux or Windows under a VM in OSX or I could boot directly into them. Of course at the time (3 years ago) it was miserable to actually set this up. It worked well after though.
 
Shouldn't be too difficult, I think you should be able to just make 3 partitions in Disk Util and boot from the install CDs for the other OSs (hold option during startup to select the CD). While in the OS installers use them to format the partitions correctly.

Then after you're all done install rEFInd (an updated fork of rEFIt, should have mentioned before in this thread) so you can choose your OS on startup. http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
 

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