Easiest distro I've encountered so far.

[dennilfloss]

Kiwi Linux 8.08 is the easiest distro I've encountered for a newbie coming from Windows XP so far.

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05062

Linux Mint was pretty good and looked gorgeous but I never managed to connect to the Internet with it. Kiwi is also based on Ubuntu so it's very similar but the connection dialogues look more like those of Knoppix and were very easy and worked. I was reading Ars in barely a minute.

That distro has codexes already installed so it played avi, mpeg, mp3, even flash right away. Only thing I could not get to play was a DVD. It just could not see it (mount?) in my DVD-RW. Still, that's probably a minor problem (due to using it from the Live DVD maybe?).

Here's a screenshot I took of it tweaked to my liking.

http://img73.imageshack.us/img...441/screenshot1ul4.jpg

Colour me a impressed.:thumbsup:

 

[Nothinman]

I'll never understand the dozens of Ubuntu off-shoots. Doing the same stuff that they do is very little work and you only have to do it once.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Hmm, color me interested.

 

[The Keeper]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I'll never understand the dozens of Ubuntu off-shoots. Doing the same stuff that they do is very little work and you only have to do it once.

I agree. Variety is good but in the linux world it has gone to the extreme. Every man and their dog wants to do their own distro. They should instead contribute to the existing projects.

The work on Kiwi could have been put towards Linux Mint for example, which does just what Kiwi does. In the open-source world everyone can take whatever they want from another distro, but it still feels counter-productive to do so instead of directly contributing to an existing project.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

The skin looks like GTK 1. Ew.

 

[ethebubbeth]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
The skin looks like GTK 1. Ew.

Yeah, that's the old gorilla theme... interesting.

 

[dennilfloss]

I just chose the gorilla theme amongst those listed for the window borders when I customized the look. That's all.

 

[dennilfloss]

Here is its unaltered look, Ubuntu-flavoured obviously.

http://img185.imageshack.us/im...4246/screenshotmp2.png

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: dennilfloss
Here is its unaltered look, Ubuntu-flavoured obviously.

http://img185.imageshack.us/im...4246/screenshotmp2.png

wait...the default theme on kiwi uses the ubuntu hardy heron background?

thats just lazy.

 

[dennilfloss]

On a hunch, I downloaded Kiwi 8.03, based on the previous version of Ubuntu, and that solved my DVD mount problem. Looks like the quirk originated with Hardy Heron. Tested it by viewing Xanadu & Zardoz.

And all that was working in 8.08 (e.g. flash, internet, avi, mpeg, mp3s) still works.

Now I found the perfect Linux distro for me.

 

[Brainonska511]

I just started using Ubuntu 8.04 for the hell of it. So far it's been pretty easy to set up. Even got my multimedia hotkeys that would only work with WMP or PowerDVD in Windows to work with Songbird in Linux.