Kiwix, wikipedia offline reader, a port for Pandora ?

[ekianjo]

One request I send in the wild : Kiwix, an offline reader for Wikipedia, which would be mightly useful for Pandora. I know there is already evopedia out therem but Kiwix is superior as it uses highly compressed archives, has thumbnails and displays html as well just like the real wikipedia.


Source code is available from the official website. It is already available for Gnu/Linux.


http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page


If someone is capable of doing such a port it would be very much appreciated. Have an encyclopedia on the go is always a great thing.

 

[2bit]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

 

[ekianjo]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

It just compresses the wikipedia archive for storage (so that it takes less space on your sd card, for example). The articles look the same in the end.

 

[2bit]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

It just compresses the wikipedia archive for storage (so that it takes less space on your sd card, for example). The articles look the same in the end.

I would love to see a port in that case Wikipedia although not always 100 percent accurate is nice for when you want a quick answer .

 

[ekianjo]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

It just compresses the wikipedia archive for storage (so that it takes less space on your sd card, for example). The articles look the same in the end.

I would love to see a port in that case Wikipedia although not always 100 percent accurate is nice for when you want a quick answer .

It's not about whether it's correct or not. It's about having a whole encyclopedia in your pocket even when you have no internet connection

 

[WizardStan]

Wikipedia is 8.5GB compressed. That's a single file archive though, not sure what Kiwix does. When the Pandora project was first started and this was brought up as a potential use it was only 6GB.

 

[2bit]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

It just compresses the wikipedia archive for storage (so that it takes less space on your sd card, for example). The articles look the same in the end.

I would love to see a port in that case Wikipedia although not always 100 percent accurate is nice for when you want a quick answer .

It's not about whether it's correct or not. It's about having a whole encyclopedia in your pocket even when you have no internet connection

Don't you have to update it every time you have every time it well uhh ... needs to be updated ?

 

[ekianjo]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

It just compresses the wikipedia archive for storage (so that it takes less space on your sd card, for example). The articles look the same in the end.

I would love to see a port in that case Wikipedia although not always 100 percent accurate is nice for when you want a quick answer .

It's not about whether it's correct or not. It's about having a whole encyclopedia in your pocket even when you have no internet connection

Don't you have to update it every time you have every time it well uhh ... needs to be updated ?

It's not relevant to get the update for all subjects. A lots of history related pieces don't change everyday, right?

 

[Lafazar]

Wow, I was waiting for an offline Wikipedia reader and had completely missed that there is already a port of evopedia in the repo. Just installed it and I have the following tips (collected from the repo page):


You can download archives from here on your PC, copy them on your SD card and add them manually to evopedia (German Wikipedia: 3.6GB, English Wikipedia: 13.8GB):


http://dumpathome.ev.../dumps/finished


You don't need to use the included browser in the PND, you can use your favourite browser and point it to the following address while the main evopedia window is still running:


http://127.0.0.1:8080


Runs pretty well so far, even equations and asian letters work fine. The main advantage of Kiwix would be better compression and the possibility of dumps with included pictures.

 

[apersonthinks]

If you really want to use kiwix, try Pandebian sid. I tried compiling it under squeeze and it depends on xulrunner which is very outdated in squeeze.

 

[ekianjo]

Wow, I was waiting for an offline Wikipedia reader and had completely missed that there is already a port of evopedia in the repo. Just installed it and I have the following tips (collected from the repo page):


You can download archives from here on your PC, copy them on your SD card and add them manually to evopedia (German Wikipedia: 3.6GB, English Wikipedia: 13.8GB):


http://dumpathome.ev.../dumps/finished


You don't need to use the included browser in the PND, you can use your favourite browser and point it to the following address while the main evopedia window is still running:


http://127.0.0.1:8080


Runs pretty well so far, even equations and asian letters work fine. The main advantage of Kiwix would be better compression and the possibility of dumps with included pictures.

Yes, that is the advantage of Kiwix.


Thanks for the tips about evopedia being readable in the browser though, I was not aware of that!

 

[Lafazar]

Yes, that is the advantage of Kiwix.
Thanks for the tips about evopedia being readable in the browser though, I was not aware of that!

When I found that out (thanks to Darkknight512's comment on the repo), evopedia went from great to fantastic for me. Many thanks to mcobit for porting evopedia!

 

[ekianjo]

Yes, that is the advantage of Kiwix.
Thanks for the tips about evopedia being readable in the browser though, I was not aware of that!

When I found that out (thanks to Darkknight512's comment on the repo), evopedia went from great to fantastic for me. Many thanks to mcobit for porting evopedia!

By the way is it possible to put a 13 gigas archive on a sd card? Does it need specific formatting ? Or is the 13 gigas archive split in smaller files actually?

 

[2bit]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

It just compresses the wikipedia archive for storage (so that it takes less space on your sd card, for example). The articles look the same in the end.

I would love to see a port in that case Wikipedia although not always 100 percent accurate is nice for when you want a quick answer .

It's not about whether it's correct or not. It's about having a whole encyclopedia in your pocket even when you have no internet connection

Don't you have to update it every time you have every time it well uhh ... needs to be updated ?

It's not relevant to get the update for all subjects. A lots of history related pieces don't change everyday, right?

I'm fairly obsessive about being up to date

 

[mcobit]

By the way is it possible to put a 13 gigas archive on a sd card? Does it need specific formatting ? Or is the 13 gigas archive split in smaller files actually?

If it is a single file, the filesystem needs to be ntfs or ext2/3/4

 

[Lafazar]

By the way is it possible to put a 13 gigas archive on a sd card? Does it need specific formatting ? Or is the 13 gigas archive split in smaller files actually?

If it is a single file, the filesystem needs to be ntfs or ext2/3/4

The evopedia archives are split into 500MB chunks and don't require any special filesystems (I use it on FAT32). This is what the english wikipedia looks like for example:

Directory of C:\Users\Lafazar\Downloads\torrents\wikipedia\wikipedia_en_2012-02-11


04.09.2012 15:36   	    50 coordinates_01.idx

04.09.2012 15:36   	    98 coordinates_02.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       1'122 coordinates_03.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       9'518 coordinates_04.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       1'086 coordinates_05.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       2'610 coordinates_06.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       2'406 coordinates_07.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       38'326 coordinates_08.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       6'926 coordinates_09.idx

04.09.2012 15:36       150'178 coordinates_10.idx

04.09.2012 15:45   6'469'658 coordinates_11.idx

04.09.2012 15:35       55'222 coordinates_12.idx

04.09.2012 15:41       186'118 coordinates_13.idx

04.09.2012 15:44   2'024'018 coordinates_14.idx

04.09.2012 15:43       12'574 coordinates_15.idx

04.09.2012 15:43       5'970 coordinates_16.idx

04.09.2012 15:43       15'686 coordinates_17.idx

04.09.2012 15:45   217'095'460 math.dat

04.09.2012 15:45   6'353'856 math.idx

04.09.2012 15:37   	    647 metadata.txt

04.09.2012 15:45   369'520'979 titles.idx

04.09.2012 15:45   524'370'783 wikipedia_00.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'351'642 wikipedia_01.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'327'443 wikipedia_02.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'324'967 wikipedia_03.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'375'158 wikipedia_04.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'289'886 wikipedia_05.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'304'869 wikipedia_06.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'294'770 wikipedia_07.dat

04.09.2012 15:54   524'329'718 wikipedia_08.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   524'328'603 wikipedia_09.dat

04.09.2012 16:27   524'314'567 wikipedia_10.dat

04.09.2012 16:50   524'340'760 wikipedia_11.dat

04.09.2012 16:50   524'349'996 wikipedia_12.dat

04.09.2012 16:52   524'316'145 wikipedia_13.dat

04.09.2012 16:52   524'303'802 wikipedia_14.dat

04.09.2012 16:53   524'308'885 wikipedia_15.dat

04.09.2012 16:53   524'365'900 wikipedia_16.dat

04.09.2012 16:54   524'379'278 wikipedia_17.dat

04.09.2012 16:54   524'341'607 wikipedia_18.dat

04.09.2012 16:54   524'365'776 wikipedia_19.dat

04.09.2012 16:54   524'310'387 wikipedia_20.dat

04.09.2012 17:42   524'305'559 wikipedia_21.dat

04.09.2012 17:42   524'319'596 wikipedia_22.dat

04.09.2012 17:42   524'351'538 wikipedia_23.dat

04.09.2012 17:43   524'333'787 wikipedia_24.dat

04.09.2012 17:44   524'304'792 wikipedia_25.dat

04.09.2012 17:44   524'371'005 wikipedia_26.dat

04.09.2012 16:04   45'414'122 wikipedia_27.dat

		   49 File(s) 14'804'347'849 bytes

I'm fairly obsessive about being up to date

Well, that's going to be a problem, because making a complete dump of wikipedia takes quite a lot of time and computing power so it's not done often (evopedia seems to update once a year, don't know how often complete wikipedia dumps are made). So you'll never be quite up to date with an offline wikipedia dump.

 

[ekianjo]

So how would it work exactly would it summarize the full page or compress them in some way unknowable to unknowable to those under 15 who are without computer training ?

It just compresses the wikipedia archive for storage (so that it takes less space on your sd card, for example). The articles look the same in the end.

I would love to see a port in that case Wikipedia although not always 100 percent accurate is nice for when you want a quick answer .

It's not about whether it's correct or not. It's about having a whole encyclopedia in your pocket even when you have no internet connection

Don't you have to update it every time you have every time it well uhh ... needs to be updated ?

It's not relevant to get the update for all subjects. A lots of history related pieces don't change everyday, right?

I'm fairly obsessive about being up to date

How did you live before Internet ?

Thanks Lafazar, very helpful !

 

[Lafazar]

I made search plugins for German and English evopedia dumps, this should make using it with compatible browsers like Firefox much easier:


http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?author=Lafazar

 

[diligentcircle]

How did you live before Internet ?

If he's 15, he didn't.

 

[ekianjo]

How did you live before Internet ?

If he's 15, he didn't.

True. Good point


You make me feel old now !