Rhino Linux 2023-4
INTRO/SETUP
I'm gonna see if I can stilll remember how to do this stuff--it's been a while. I decided to take a look at Rhino Linux because (1) I've never heard of it, (2) it uses a package manager I've never heard of, and (3) it's based on a stack I can deal with (although I might have preferred Debian). Also, the Rhino literature I've seen so far makes it look like Xfce is their favorite/only DE, and Solus is just now creating an Xfce edition, so I'm curious about how it's been done elsewhere.
Rhino starts up with a rather interesting introductory screen. There's nothing that jumps out at me saying "Install system," or similar. I'm sure I'll be able to find it somewhere, but it doesn't matter right now, because I plan on preparing some partitions before I start an install. I just need a partition editor for now.
The VM window also doesn't automatically enlarge when the host window does, unlike Solus VMs and many others I've reviewed. I'll see if I can find some Display settings and make this a little larger. I won on two issues. The menus are arranged much differntly that Solus Xfce's (more like GNOME), but I was able to set the resolution to 1600x900, also find the system installer. I was unable to find GPartEd, or anything else that looked like a partition editor, so I'm hoping that there will be one in the system installer.
The installer looks a lot like Calamares, so I may get my wish, and be able to create some partitions from in here.
Whatever the distro, I always start VMs out with 4 cores, and 4 GB of memory, a 1 GiB swap partition, a 6 GiB swap partition, and 25 GiB for the root file system. I'll soon find out if Rhino is happy with all that.
So far, it looks like this just might work. These images give you a good preview of the Solus 4.5 installer, as it's also Calamares, with nearly everything the same as this one, except for the name on it.
Well, everything worked, although not much looks different at this point. Rhino has a top panel, while Solus Xfce still has a bottom panel as of RC 4. And that left-side panel needs to go. I noticed that Plank is in their application menu, so I'll probably go for that instead. One thing that I've probably only noticed because Solus is so fast overall, is that Rhino seems particularly slow overall. And it's not because it's huge. It's tiny.
Even as an installed distro, Rhino doesn't automatically enlarge itself when the VBox host window does, so I once again set it to a resolution of 1600x900, which is the next 16x9 resolution under 1920x1080, the native size of my screen. Later on, I'll be able to use VBox to make the VM full-screen, but for now, I want to keep the host wondow visible. as I configure the VM. Perhaps if I can get it to install the VBox guest additions, it will behave more like Solus. And I noticed that the time displayed in the panel is 7 hours ahead of where we are here in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Apparently it's displaying a European time, although the Calamares installer correctly located us in the US Western time zone.
This pretty much takes care of installing the distro. Tomorrow I'll write more about configuring it to be a useful daily-driver.
It's "tomorrow" now and I've been working on a continuation of this document for more than 6 hours. I've run into some serious problems that I've never encountered in any other modern distro that I've reviewed. So, since this is now Christmas Day, and I have other commitments for my time, I may--and I stress may--continue this work at another time. But, more likely, I may just chalk this one up as one very bad idea altogether.
In all these hours of working with Rhino, I've already decided that it's definitely not for me. It is a very tiny distribution, despite being a Ubuntu derivative. Perhaps it's too tiny. It uses only about 6 GB of the 32 GB virtual disk drive that I've installed it on. It isn't nearly as pleasant to work with or to configure as most other modern distros I've reviewed.
So, for now, I'm going to go do some other things. If I never return to this thread, you'll know that I've spent a great many hours on it, and that I've finally decided that reviewing it was just a bad idea to start with. If I could simply delete this whole post, I would probably do that, but this is Flarum, so you all know how that goes. What's here so far will stay, then, and it might even help someone who would like to install and try Rhino out-of-the-box without making all the modifications that I had intended to make. If you're that person, perhaps you'd still find this much of my review useful.