Kiwi 7.10 Beta LiveCD Was Released

Kiwi 7.10 Beta LiveCD was released yesterday, as announced by its developers. This Linux distribution is based on Ubuntu 7.10 Beta, with some modifications.

This distribution brings some changes to Ubuntu, like the Romanian and Hungarian localization and language support packages besides English, the removal of Evolution, Rhythmbox, Ekiga, Asian fonts and languages other than Hungarian, English and Romanian. The LiveCD has no Windows applications.

For users who want to see a movie or listen to music, the Kiwi team made some interesting changes: Audacious audio player was added, and totem-gstreamer was replaced with totem-xine. Two libraries were added so the new media player would work: libxine-1-ffmpeg and libdvdcss2. For graphics editing you now have Inkscape.

For your Internet navigation you now have Firefox equipped with plugins for Java, Flash and mplayer so you can enjoy every site you will visit. Also, if you have a speedtouch USB modem you should know that it has from now on its firmware added in Kiwi. The networking support is now improved, by enabling the pppoeconf GUI.

Kiwi 7.10 Beta comes with some interesting new usplash artwork and gives the user more eye-candy.

What is Kiwi?

Kiwi is a modified Ubuntu Live CD for the i386 architecture started by an Ubuntu core developer, Jani Monoses with the support of Startx SRL. It has some other contributors, including Simona Muntean, Cosmin Saveanu, Gergely Imre, Adi Roiban and Mihai Brehar who provided testing, feedback, artwork and hosting.

Kiwi is using the same software repositories as Ubuntu with one more source added for the artwork related or slightly modified packages. This way it is easy to switch to and from Ubuntu. All the security and bugfix updates from Ubuntu are getting into Kiwi Linux automatically. The developers plan to launch at least once every six months, following the usual Ubuntu release schedule.

You can download Kiwi 7.10 Beta right now from Softpedia.