 One of the complaints that many people have with Ubuntu as a Linux distribution is the fact that Ubuntu is a static release model distribution rather than a rolling release model Linux distribution such as Arch or Gen2, things like that. And Ubuntu is great. That static release model is great, especially their long-term support release is great if you're wanting stability. If ultimately you primarily value stability, that's what you want to be on. But many, especially more advanced Linux users, many developers, they prefer being on rolling release model distributions so they can have the freshest packages. I'm very much that way because I love being able to test out new software all the time. And I can't be stuck on a Linux distribution that won't see an update any major package updates for two, four, five years, whatever it happens to be. I want the bleeding edge. I want the freshest packages immediately as they are available. And Arch, of course, is my preferred distro in this respect. But you can turn Ubuntu into a rolling release. It's really kind of a quasi rolling release. It's not bleeding edge like Arch is bleeding edge, but it gets you much closer to that. And what I'm talking about today is this utility that Martin Wimpress, who works for Canonical, and he heads up the Ubuntu desktop team, I believe, and he works on Ubuntu Monte. Martin Wimpress, he has a great YouTube channel, if you haven't checked out his YouTube channel. And he created this really cool script called Rolling Rhino. It basically changes all your apt sources in Ubuntu over to the development branch of Ubuntu, which essentially gets you pretty close to being a rolling release. So the source code for Rolling Rhino can be found over on GitHub if you go to Wimpy's world slash rolling Rhino over on GitHub. And if you wanted to, of course, you could read the source code. Rolling Rhino is a bash script. It is 178 lines long, so not a terribly long script. Basically, you can read the script if you want to see exactly what's going to happen. But really what it's going to do is going to change the sources list. So your apt sources, it's going to change your apt sources over to the development branch from whatever standard repository is currently running on your version of Ubuntu. And I really love the logo. Nice artwork. I don't know who created the Rolling Rhino logo, but that's a really cool logo. Martin Wimpress also put out a video. It's like a two hour long video where he goes over the process of creating this particular Rolling Rhino utility to change over your sources to the development branch. And it's a really neat video. I haven't watched the whole thing, but Martin Wimpress does some really good stuff. Unlike a lot of YouTube channels that you typically watch for Linux content, Martin often has a problem and he solves it. You see somebody start a video and he has a problem and he tries to find a solution to it. So check out Martin's YouTube channel. I think you'll be impressed with what he does on his channel. Now to install this thing, you do have to be on a non LTS Ubuntu because right now I don't believe they support switching from Ubuntu LTS over to this Rolling Rhino model. Typically you probably shouldn't have installed the LTS if you were wanting to immediately go to the next development branch anyway. And what they recommend is that you actually install one of the daily builds for the latest Ubuntu. And that's what I did. I went ahead and I downloaded the latest Ubuntu desktop daily build. So this will be Ubuntu, what will be Ubuntu 2010 eventually. I grabbed today's daily build. I installed it inside Vert Manager. And then to switch over to Rolling Rhino, basically we need to put three lines into the terminal. We need to run this Get Clone, which it just clones this Rolling Rhino repository. And then we need to CD into the new Rolling Rhino directory that will be created on our system. Inside that directory will be the Rolling Rhino script. We need to execute that script. And that's it. So pretty simple process to get this working. At least it seems to be, I haven't done it yet. Let me go ahead and fire up a VM of the latest daily image of 2010. And let's try it out. So let me go ahead and switch over to this VM. So this is a newly created VM of the latest daily build of Ubuntu. All right. And let's log in. Oh, we got some interesting graphical stuff going on. But this is a VM. But the point of this is really just to see if this script actually works. So really all I want to do is I want to open up a terminal. And then I want to zoom in a little bit so you guys can see exactly what I'm about to do here. Let me go full screen. And I'm going to run that Get Clone. So I'm going to get clone HTTPS colon slash slash. And it was hosted, of course, at GitHub.com. And the URL is Wimpy's world slash rolling dash Rhino where I spilled everything right. All right, Wimpy's world slash rolling dash Rhino dot get. All right, let's get clone that repository. Get is not installed by default on Ubuntu. So I need to run a pseudo apt install get. I'm not sure why the Ubuntu guys don't install get by default. Seems a little strange. A lot of Linux distributions actually don't install get by default. I don't understand why I think most users once they get past like the absolute noob stage, they probably are going to use get at some point. So it's not a terribly large program. It's not like it takes up a lot of disk space. And let me go ahead and you guys probably are not going to be able to read that because my head is in the way. So let me clear the screen and then I'm going to run get clone and then the URL for the rolling Rhino repository. All right, and we ran the get clone. Now we need to CD into the rolling Rhino directory that is now created on our system. I wanted to I could run an LS and see what is in that directory. And there is this shell script rolling Rhino. Let's execute that to execute that script. You need to do a period slash and then rolling dash Rhino. And if you hit enter, it complains that you need to be root. Now that is interesting because the documentation made no mention at all that anything would need to be run as root. But it does make sense. So you have to be rude, of course, to change the apt sources list. There's no way around that. They probably should mention that on the GitHub page just because I think some people know better. And you know, when you get to get this error and says it needs to be run as root, a lot of newer users are going to say, I'm never going to run a shell script that I can't even read because I don't read bash scripting. I'm not going to run that as root. It might break my system. So I think they need to point out, yes, you do have to run this as root. All right. And we get some information here. This is interesting. So LSB release detected Ubuntu detected Ubuntu Groovy Gorilla. That is what 2010 will be called. Development branch is detected. We're running the Ubuntu desktop. Now we could have run this on Kabuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Monte. I'm on mainline Ubuntu for purposes of this demonstration. It says there are no PPAs detected. This is good. Now that is good because this script may or may not, I don't think it detects your PPAs. So if you had a bunch of PPAs added and then tried to do this, you could run into some issues. So it does say all checks have passed. Are you sure you want to start tracking the development series? And by default it's set to no. So we do have to type Y to confirm that yes, this is really what we want to do. And it's going to change over all the sources to Ubuntu develop. So we will be rolling along basically until I guess 2010 finally sees a release. And then I don't know if the rolling Rhino, we would probably have to run the rolling Rhino script at that point once 2010 is officially released so that we could I guess go along with the next development branch, which would be what 2104. The documentation doesn't mention whether, you know, we would need to run this again in six months or not. I'm assuming that is the case though. I do like that when the rolling Rhino script is finished, we get the rolling Rhino logo. That's pretty neat. So let me clear the screen. I'm going to CD back into the home directory. I'm going to run a sudo apt update and then sudo apt upgrade. So I just want to run this to see if there are any errors and it does. We do have some errors that says conflicting distribution. So it says yeah, security dot Ubuntu slash Ubuntu develop security expected develop dash security but got groovy. So it was expecting a certain repository here and it was it's getting something else. So I need to investigate this error a little bit and see if I can solve that even with these errors, these conflicting distributions. I wonder if I could still do like a sudo apt install. I don't think I've installed anything on the system other than git. I don't think vim is installed by default on Ubuntu. I don't think so. So let me go ahead and install it. I mean it's pulling everything down. Yeah, so everything seems to be working. I still don't like that. I do get that error though on the sudo apt update and these conflicts. I'm glad I did get this error though on camera and this is something to consider because this is a brand new installation. I installed the 2010 daily build just for purposes of this video. You guys that have been running something for a while and maybe you've added a bunch of PPAs and everything. I mean you could run into some real problems here and that is something that really needs to be considered. So you guys that want to run the rolling Rhino. There's a couple of things you really need to understand. First of all rolling Rhino isn't really a rolling release model in the traditional sense because this is basically the development branch of what will be 2010. At some point there'll be a feature freeze. Packages will quit seeing updates and then after 2010 is released there will be a few weeks where there's no 2104 development branch in existence yet. So out of this six month release cycle really only looking about four to five months of actually being a rolling release and then there's some downtime. Also this is very much alpha slash beta quality software during this time and you have to understand that you are on your own with Ubuntu rolling Rhino because this is not officially supported right. This is the development branch. It's not meant to be stable. It's not meant to be run on a production machine in a production environment. So if things break you don't have any right to complain about it because essentially you are a beta tester. You signed up to test things and to have breakages and honestly if you desperately want to be on a rolling release Linux distribution and you're using Ubuntu honestly you shouldn't be running Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a fantastic distribution. It is not a rolling release distribution though so if you need to be on a rolling release distribution honestly I would strongly consider just moving to Arch or an Arch based distribution because that typically is the easiest path. Getting into or a rolling release a proper rolling release where you get the latest packages the freshest packages. Arch tends to be more stable these days. I very rarely have any of my Arch systems break on me. Typically if I have a breakage from an update it's something minor something that can be fixed within a couple of minutes. I've never had like a machine that was completely broken and I had to format the drive and reinstall because of a bad Arch update. So if you want to be on a rolling release model I would consider Arch Linux especially some other things you could consider. I mean you could consider Gen2 if you don't mind a source based distribution. You could consider Debian SID. You can consider OpenSusa Tumbleweed. I think you would be happier on those because those would be an actual rolling release Linux distribution not one that's quasi rolling release and those would actually be supported especially on something like Arch or Gen2 because they only have one model. They have a rolling release model. They don't have a stable model where if you're running the rolling Rhino again you're essentially a beta tester and you need to be prepared for that. If you are a very experienced Linux user and you don't mind breaking your system occasionally and then having to fix it then the rolling Rhino might be for you. For me though I would say rolling Rhino seems to be for people that are Ubuntu enthusiasts advanced Ubuntu users and that people that want to find bugs and solve those bugs. If you're one of those types of people that's great. If you're looking for you know a stable distribution to run as your daily desktop driver I would not do this though. Now before I go I need to thank a few people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Pablo, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy, UK, Arch5530, Chris, Chuck, DJ, Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, Omri, Paul, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. They are the producers of this episode without these guys. You wouldn't know about Ubuntu and rolling Rhino. Well if you were subscribed to Martin Wimpress's YouTube channel you might know about it. But if you weren't you still well yeah you'd know about it. But anyway I want to thank each and every one of these people. I want to thank each and every one of these people as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen. Each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen is supporting me over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support DistroTube you'll find him over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.