## 1.3 Getting and Installing Kiwi

Kiwi is distributed through its official website, at http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/. It is released as a tarball frequently, and the tarball is distributed from that page. Announcements of the release should go out to `pygtk-list`, Freshmeat and `python-announce`.

You will need to install the following packages if they are not already on your system:

- Python 2.3 or newer
- GTK+ 2.8
- PyGTK 2.8
- Gazpacho 0.6.5

Most of these packages are available on the main distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Conectiva and Mandrake, and might even be preinstalled in your system. If not, you can pull the source code, compile and install them.

You can also use SVN to check out Kiwi, by following the instructions on the Async CVS page. The module name is `kiwi`. Async's ViewCVS service can be used to check development of the kiwi module in real time, and there is also an browse source of the code. Finally, bugs in kiwi should be reported to Async's installation of Bugzilla.

Kiwi includes a fair amount of tests in the tests/ directory in the tarball, and they can be run in-place (no need to install it first), so you can easily see what sort of application it supports.

Since Kiwi uses Distutils, installing Kiwi should be very simple. Once you have installed the dependent packages, run (as root, normally):

        python setup.py install

in the main directory. That's it. To test the installation, do:

        >>> import kiwi

from the Python console. It should work, and if it does, everything is ready.