So I’ve installed Ubuntu on the metal of my MacBook Pro Retina (13 inch, ifyou must know) and in order to dual-boot the machine, I use the rEFInd BootManager.

• Refind Boot Manager Themes

It works really well and was simple to configure, but I found that afterupgrading to Yosemite (10.10), Mac OS X became the default boot OS, whereasrEFInd was booting by default originally.

Refind installiation is quite simple. It has a theme support and easy to configure with text-based. However, it's only recognize efi boots and also it will automatically include kernel which make the os menu duplicate. But, cleaning the menu from duplicating boot files are as easy as pressing delete buttons. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. REFInd is a UEFI boot manager capable of launching EFISTUB kernels. It is a fork of the no-longer-maintained rEFIt and fixes many issues with respect to non-Mac UEFI booting. It is designed to be platform-neutral and to simplify booting multiple OSes.

Originally, this was fine, I dealt with just holding the Option key downduring boot to bring up the Startup Manager and selecting EFI Boot inorder to get into Linux. I wasn’t restarting the computer that much anyway.But like most things, eventually, it irked me enough that I set out to fix it.

Normally, in OS X, to change the boot drive, you’d use System Preferences andchange your Startup Disk but in this case, you won’t see your EFI partitionavailable to be selected. Likewise, even if you go ahead and follow rEFInd’smethod for mounting the EFI partition, you’ll find that it’s not selectable asa Startup Disk. Or, even if you can, selecting it and restarting makes no difference.

So, what’s a guy to do? Turns out you can hold the Control key downprior to clicking onto a volume/device in the Startup Manager to set thatvolume as the boot default! So, I held down Control, clicked EFI Bootand that’s that.

This worked for me on my 2011-era Mac, now running OS X 10.10, but since thisoption isn’t officially documented anywhere that I can see, it could go awayat any time. Try it and add a comment below with your results.

Thanks to Macworld for the solution!

As a side note, it’s interesting to see the UI for Mac OS has barely changedin decades for selecting a Startup Disk.

rEFInd by Roderick W. Smith is a boot manager that's made for computers based on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and Unified EFI (UEFI). A boot manager presents a menu of options when the computer first starts up. This makes it possible to have multiple operating systems on your computer and choose which one you'd like to use during bootup.

Since rEFInd is a fork of rEFIt, many features are similar. It has support for text-mode and graphical operation, auto-detection of EFI and BIOS boot loaders, user-configurable graphics and icons, the ability to set OS-specific boot options, and more. rEFInd goes beyond rEFIt and offers bug fixes, user-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders, network boot options, a configurable delay before scanning for boot loaders, ability to set the screen's graphics resolution, and much, much more.

- Learn more about rEFInd (Official Site)

Refind Boot Manager Themes

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