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A few days ago, the Kiwilinux team announced the release of the latest version of their Linux distribution. Kiwi 8.04 has some nice features, like the support for the Speedtouch USB ADSL modem, and also includes by default the necessary packages to play restricted video, audio and Flash formats.

The software repositories for Kiwi and Ubuntu are much the same with one source extra for Kiwi, required for some minor differences with some packages. The major advantages are that it's relatively easy to change to or from Ubuntu, and also that Kiwi benefits from all the security updates of the former, as these are fetched automatically.

Although they are similar in many ways, the two distros do have some notable differences. For instance, Kiwi 8.08 has a different default mail client (Mozilla Thunderbird) and music player (Audacious) from Ubuntu's Evolution and Rhythmbox. Apart from that, Kiwi 8.08 comes with two very useful packages: unrar (a freeware program for extracting and viewing the contents of archives created with the WinRAR archiver) and msttcorefonts (which allows the installation of the Microsoft True Type Core Fonts for the Web).

Here is the complete list of differences from Ubuntu 8.04.1:
· Packages up to date as of August 28, 2008;
· Thunderbird as the default mail client and Audacious the music player;
· All gstreamer codecs and flashplugin-nonfree;
· Compiz extra settings GUI;
· msttcorefonts and unrar;
· a graphical application designed to restore GRUB boot menus lost after installing other OSes;
· mc (midnight commander);
· 12Mb of space have been cleared by removing the on-CD package archive.

About Kiwi Linux:
Kiwi is an Ubuntu-based distribution for the x86 processor family that comes on a live CD. It features numerous tools such as Flash plugin for Firefox, multimedia codecs, support for encrypted DVD, PPPoE GUI for an easier access to local ISPs, and Romanian and Hungarian localization. As for language support, the current version includes on the CD only English, German, French, Romanian and Hungarian.

Get Kiwi 8.08 right now from here.
By: Mihai Mircea, Linux Editor (news.softpedia.com)