Kiwi is a modified Ubuntu live CD for the i386 architecture. It includes Romanian and Hungarian localization, multimedia codecs, encrypted DVD support, Flash plugin for Firefox, PPPoE GUI for accessing local internet services (Clicknet and RDS).

The latest release, Kiwi 8.12 is based on Ubuntu 8.10 Differences from Ubuntu include :

• Packages up to date as of 12-15-2008 from the 8.10 archives

• Added Wubi (was not on previous Kiwi Linux CDs)

• OpenOffice 3.0 with most up to date Romanian translations from the Narro project

• GUI for pppoeconf and support for connections via Speedtouch 330 USB ADSL modem (Romtelecom)

• A graphical tool for restoring GRUB boot menus lost after installing other OSes.

• Evolution removed, no mail client at all on the CD

• Flashplugin-nonfree and gstreamer codecs for restricted audio and video formats

• Compiz extra settings GUI

• p7zip, unrar and msttcorefonts

• the on-CD package archive is removed to gain 12M of space.

Kiwi uses the same software repositories as Ubuntu with one additional source added for the handful of artwork related or slightly modified packages. Hence it is easy to switch to and from Ubuntu and all the security and bugfix updates from Ubuntu are getting into Kiwi automatically.

The packages are hosted and built in the Kiwilinux team's Launchpad PPA. The main archive is a mirrored and GPG-signed copy of this and can be enabled by adding this line to your apt sources: deb http://kiwilinux.org/archive intrepid main. Medibuntu repositories are enabled by default as well.