Enterprise: a UEFI boot loader for Linux

July 11, 2016 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

‘Enterprise’ is the name of a UEFI boot loader that is meant to boot 1 or more Linux ISOs off a USB thumbdrive. The last release was back in 2015, but there is recent Github code activity. SevenBits created ‘Enterprise’, in addition to ‘Mac Linux USB Loader’, which sets up a bootable USB with Enterprise.

Enterprise (named after the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek) is an EFI program that is designed to assist in booting Linux distributions from USB sticks on UEFI-based PCs and Macs, something that is continously regarded as being near to impossible due to quirks in vendors’ EFI implementations and really quite poor support from Linux distributions. Using Enterprise, you can create bootable USB drives that boot on a UEFI-based computer without needing rEFIt or rEFInd to be installed. Originally designed to compliment ‘Mac Linux USB Loader’, Enterprise can also be used on its own to boot Linux on a variety of UEFI-based PCs and Macs. The purpose of Enterprise is as the first stage in a two-stage booting process for ‘Mac Linux USB Loader’-created USB drives. Enterprise is a custom UEFI boot manager designed to load Linux distributions, even those without UEFI booting support, directly from ISO files on UEFI-based computers. Enterprise provides an easy-to-use and simplistic interface that automates many of the tasks necessary to boot distributions of Linux from an ISO file. Enterprise supports booting multiple distributions, so you can have more than one distribution per USB stick and multiple configurations for each distribution. Enterprise requires a configuration file telling it about which distributions it should load. This configuration file is created automatically when you use tools like Mac Linux USB Loader, though it is possible to write your own file and configure Enterprise as one would configure other boot managers such as GRUB, gummiboot, and syslinux, albeit much more simply. Enterprise is under the LGPL; it pulls in code from other software projects (namely, gummiboot). It is written in portable C, and can be compiled to run on both 32-bit and 64-bit EFI firmware types.

https://www.sevenbits.tk/
https://github.com/SevenBits/Enterprise
https://sevenbits.github.io/Mac-Linux-USB-Loader/

rEFInd

November 19, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

https://twitter.com/LukeVizzicks/status/666916414528311296

Luke Vizzicks has a short post on rEFInd, a UEFI boot manager. If you’ve never seen rEFInd before, this is a good starting point:

http://lukevizzicks.co.uk/refind-an-efi-uefi-boot-manager-utility/

Gentoo support for EDK2

September 20, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

On the EDK2-devel mailing list, Stéphane Veyret just announced Gentoo Linux for EDK2, including rEFInd application support. Excerpt:

I made a Gentoo ebuild for EDK2. This ebuild transforms a little bit the installation in order to be able to use the product as is generally used a library in Linux. Samples are also modified. I also made an ebuild for rEFInd as a proof of concept.

More Information:
https://github.com/sveyret/sveyret-overlay
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.edk2.devel/2446

mini-tool review: rEFInd

May 30, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

The rEFInd Boot Manager is written by Roderick W. Smith. The author works at Canonical on Ubuntu, and has written dozens of technical books.

rEFInd is one of a handful of actively-maintained, open source UEFI-aware boot managers, and one of the most powerful ones. For Mac users, rEFInd is better than Bootcamp: with Bootcamp, you can boot Windows or Mac OS X. With rEFInd, you can boot nearly any EFI-aware OS, FreeBSD, multiple Linux distributions, as well as Mac OS X and Windows. rEFInd is worth learning if you want to dual- and multi-boot UEFI-aware operating systems, or get access to UEFI Shell and other pre-OS applications.

Before rEFInd, there was rEFIt, an Apple Mac OS X-centric boot manager for EFI. That was abandoned, and Roderick picked it up and went on to create rEFInd with it, which is actively maintained, and works with MacOSX, Windows, and Linux, and FreeBSD.

If you are new to RodsBooks.com, spend some time and look at the other UEFI pages there. I’ll have some future blog entries on some of the excellent UEFI boot loader documentation there, as well as on on gdisk, a GPT-centric disk partitioning tool. The web site has Paypal donate button; please consider donating to this open source author to help with the future of this tool.

More Information:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REFInd