Fixing rEFInd on my Macbook

This morning when I started work, I was once again overcome by rage that my Linux MacBook doesn’t start of it’s own accord… and why the fuck is Ubuntu still listed? I managed to contain my anger until after work, when I immediately set about fixing it.

The latter part is dead easy to solve: on a Mac, just hit - when highlighting the ones you don’t want to see any more, it’ll ask if you really want to hide it, hit yes and boom… don’t have to look at it any more. I now have Linux and the MacOS partition (which I don’t use any more, not sure why I haven’t just scrapped it). Nice and tidy.

Changing the timeout involves editing the configuration file, which lives in the ESP… which is allegedly mounted by default in /boot/efi, but I don’t appear to be that lucky. No matter, it’s easy enough to find for me:

[root@MacBookPro2011 ~]# fdisk -l | grep EFI
/dev/sda1         40    409639    409600  200M EFI System
[root@MacBookPro2011 ~]# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
[root@MacBookPro2011 ~]# cd /mnt/EFI/refind/
[root@MacBookPro2011 refind]# ls refind.conf
refind.conf

Now I just have to edit this file, change timeout 20 to timeout 1. It’s important to note that per the comments/documentation, setting this to 0 means “wait forever”. I thought about using -1, but it annoys me a bit to have to buffer up keystrokes on my desktop to get into the UEFI setup, no need to afflict another machine with that rot, and 1 second is fast enough that I won’t notice it.

Save it, cd then umount /mnt and a quick reboot and it looks good enough to me.