Revision as of 03:45, 12 January 2009

Instructions can be found here: http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html

Initial indexing should be carried out on a desktop/laptop, as the freerunner is not powerful enough

offline wikipedia is one of the applications that runs on the Openmoko Phones. For a list of all applications, visit Applications

This project provides software to store the entirety of Wikipedia (any language) locally on a Linux device.

All Wikipedia pages are downloaded from the Wikipedia page dump - [1]. The files needed is called 'pages-articles.xml.bz2', and the most recent is 4.1GB

For more info visit the official website: http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html

The English Wikipedia (text only) is around 6GB, so the entire content can be stored on one 8GB device. The German Wikipedia is approximately 1/4 the size, so can be stored on a correspondingly smaller card; ditto for other languages

The software functions by running a lightweight webserver on the phone, and using php to present the pages, which are then viewed using any web browser.

Development status

At present, a single tar.bz is downloaded from the site above, the pages extract downloaded and copied to the correct location, and the indexing process run (takes approximately one hour on a dual-core 1.1GHz cpu, 1.5GB RAM laptop). Dependencies (php, perl ,python) are then installed on the freerunner, and the index and database copied to the freerunner, along with the web server.

In the future the software will be released as an ipk. Also a deb/rpm for a desktop distributions, to allow automatic download of the most recent wikipedia dump, with a diff utility to allow it to be updated and re-indexed.