Gummiboot gone
I started using the Gummiboot boot manager on my UEFI computer. However, this has now been assimilated into the systemd collective, which I have no desire to install on any of my hardware. That was fine as long as it was still available separately too, but that's no longer the case. I have two questions for you. First, is it possible to continue using Gummiboot without systemd? Second, if not, what alternatives are there? Anthony Williamson Gummiboot will continue to work for you. It has a simple job, to present you with a list of kernels or OSes to boot. The job doesn’t change so you can continue to use it. The only concern is if a security vulnerability is found, as Gummiboot is unmaintained it will not be fixed. It's possible to extract the boot manager from systemd and install that without using systemd itself, although this may not always be possible. Another alternative is to switch to a different manager, such as rEFInd ( www.rodsbooks. com/refind). With UEFI, the kernel itself becomes the bootloader, so programs like Gummiboot and rEFInd only need to manage the options without the complexities of a full bootloader like GRUB.
UEFI computers provide their own boot menu that can be used as a very basic boot manager, or it can be used to choose one, so installing rEFInd alongside Gummiboot isn't only possible, it's recommended as that gives you a fallback while getting used to rEFInd.
The web page includes installation instructions but most distros now have rEFInd in their repos. After installing, run $ sudo refind-install
This installs it to the UEFI partition and sets it as the default bootloader. It also retrieves the options used to boot the running system and adds them to the configuration. You can now reboot and try it, knowing that if anything goes wrong you still have Gummiboot.
There are two configuration files that control rEFInd’s behaviour. The main one is at EFI/refind/refind.conf and is heavily commented. The options here mainly control the appearance and behaviour of the menu. The other file is /boot/refind_linux.conf that contains the kernel options for the Linux menu entries. This was created by refind-install using your existing boot options and is used whenever booting a Linux kernel.
You can create manual configurations but this is generally unnecessary, the autodetection is good. That also means that you don't need to run anything after adding or removing a kernel, rEFInd picks up changes automatically, unlike Gummiboot or GRUB.