Rolling Rhino Remix

A rolling Ubuntu release sounds so outrageous Mayank Sharma had to see for himself if it really delivers on its word and isn't just a gimmick.

- Mayank Sharma

The distribution offers a wonderful option for anyone to track the development of the next Ubuntu release without having to fiddle with the daily installation images.

IN BRIEF

The distro looks like just another Ubuntu clone, with little visual customizations. However, the real difference exists under the covers. Although it starts off as a regular Ubuntu release, a couple of post-installation tasks transform it into a rolling release distro that fetches packages from the Ubuntu development branch.

SPECS

CPU: 2GHz

Memory: 2GB

HDD: 25GB

Build: 64-bit only

The premise of Rolling Rhino Remix is simple. Replace Ubuntu's stable release repositories with its development branch, and you've got a sort of a bleeding-edge rolling release distro. Executing the idea into a stable distro however, takes some doing.

The idea came from Ubuntu developer and former Canonical employee Stuart Langridge, who wrote the Rolling-Rhino script to transform an Ubuntu release into a rolling release composed of packages from Ubuntu's development repositories. The Rolling Rhino Remix project then took those scripts, and extended them with a couple of custom tools to create the distro.