This is the eighth article in our series looking at a FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC running Linux. This machine has an Intel N100 processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. It’s an extremely inexpensive machine costing little more than a Raspberry Pi 5 yet it’s much more powerful. It sounds like an ideal low cost machine to run Linux on the desktop.
For this article in the series, we explore installing and configuring Rhino Linux on the FIREBAT. Rhino Linux is a rolling release Ubuntu-based distribution with Pacstall and the XFCE desktop environment at its core.
Create a bootable USB key
An easy way to install Rhino Linux is to create a bootable USB key. Go to Rhino Linux’s Download page (https://rhinolinux.org/download.html). There are a few editions available: Generic ISO (x64_64), Generic ISO (ARM aarch64), Pine 64 (ARM64), and Raspberry Pi (ARM64).
The FIREBAT needs the Generic ISO (x64_64), so save that ISO to your local hard drive. It’s a 2.13GB file so it takes a minute on a fast net connection (or longer had we used the FIREBAT’s WiFi which is shockingly bad — and we’re being kind here).
Write the ISO file to a USB key. You need a utility to do this. There are lots of suitable open source software available. Popular examples include Rufus (Windows only), or the cross-platform Ventoy, USBImager, or Etcher.
In this instance we went with Ventoy if only because we already had a key with it installed, and we can literally just copy the Rhino ISO to the key.
Insert the USB key in any USB port and start the FIREBAT. We didn’t need to change any settings in the BIOS, other than to boot from the USB key.
Next page: Page 2 – Installation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Installation
Page 3 – Post Installation
Page 4 – Video
Complete list of articles in this series:
| FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction to the series with an interrogation of the system |
| Part 2 | Benchmarking the FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC |
| Part 3 | Testing the power consumption |
| Part 4 | Multimedia: Watching videos and listening to music |
| Part 5 | How does the FIREBAT fare as a gaming PC? |
| Part 6 | Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 |
| Part 7 | Installing and Configuring EndeavourOS, an Arch-based distro |
| Part 8 | Installing and Configuring Rhino Linux, a rolling release Ubuntu-based distro |
| Part 9 | VirtualBox performance on the FIREBAT |