Add a boot menu to your Boot Camp’ed Mac

Tired of holding down 'option' every time you use your BootCamp partition or forgetting to switch using the Startup Disk app?
If there's anything worse than rebooting to quickly launch your OS, then coming back to find you are in the wrong OS again, it has to involve bleeding from an orifice.

Fortunately though, there is a solution. An enterprising fellow by the name of Christoph Pfisterer has created an application called 'rEFIt', which allows you to install a graphical menu on your Intel Mac that lets you choose which OS to boot each time the system starts.

rEFIt in action
rEFIt booting on my 17" MBPro

Among the available extra options:

  • Set a timer that will automatically boot you into the default OS if your system reboots on its own or if you walk away from a reboot. It can also be set to '0', for no timeout.
  • a bootable ISO image for booting stubborn systems
  • Create keyboard shortcuts to quickly choose your OS selection
  • Disable the shell (more on that below) for deployed systems

    • In addition to the boot menu, rEFIt gives you the rEFIt shell, which gives you an ftp client, graphical text editor, hex editor, network tools and a dhcp client among other things.

    Installation is a breeze. A standard .pkg file installs everything for you...simply choose your Macintosh hard drive and rEFIt puts the boot menu onto the proper partition (there are other options for advanced users). Simply reboot and you are presented with a pleasant looking GUI from which to choose your OS, as well as the aforementioned shell tools.

    Overall, rEFIt is a tool that should have been included in BootCamp (and who knows, maybe it will be eventually). The current BootCamp solution of choosing a startup disk or holding down a key is unwieldy and awkward...very un-Mac-like. rEFIt is a great application and yet another great testimony to the power of both Open Source and the Mac development community at large.

    But...(isn't there always a but?) one thing we'd like to see is a GUI for editing the included .conf file. Some of the available options in that file are the timeout delay, and the ability to replace the rEFIt banner with your own customizable image, as well as alternate icons for the OS' themselves (rEFIt currently uses the icons seen below - which are fine - as the default) for the discriminating user.
    Again, for the more experience user, not a problem, but a configuration GUI would be a nice companion to such a great application. It wouldn't take much for someone to whip one up in XCode or RealBasic, so maybe we'll see that soon enough. Other than that, I'm not sure things could get more user-friendly and well done.

    Links
    rEFIt home page - http://refit.sourceforge.net/
    rEFIt Sourceforge page - http://sourceforge.net/projects/refit
    rEFIt Donation page (throw the guy a buck or two!) - http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?user_id=51640

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