IcedRaktajino comments on Does anyone self host Kiwix (offline wikipedia)?

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Yep, and I love it.

I've got a little Banana Pi M4 Zero (PiZero form factor but much more powerful and with 4 GB RAM) loaded up with, among other useful tools, Kiwix and the full Wikipedia dump. I just refreshed it with the 2026-02 full dump, so I'm caught up for the year. I've also got a lot of other offline docs loaded up (React, Bun, and the devdocs for several libraries I use) and it's nice to have local copies of those instead of googling every time.

Surprisingly, the full ~130 GB Wikipedia dump works fine on a regular Pi Zero 2 with 512 MB RAM. I don't know how ZIM works but it does work very very well.

permalink

fedilink

source

hideshow 4 child comments

[–] clif@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Similar setup here. Orangepi zero that starts kiwix server at boot and switches the wifi to AP mode. Just plug it in, connect to kiwix WiFi, access kiwix.local via phone browser, and shazam.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

Nice! Those AllWinner boards are a little tricky to get going and have some quirks, but the price is great for the extra horsepower you get. Granted, I use the latest Armbian since the manufacturer's images are all quite old.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] clif@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

When I saw the default configured repos were hosted by Huawei I did a double take, then installed Armbian too : D

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

[+] SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world [S] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

[deleted]

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 6 points 6 months ago

130GB for the entire thing? And the pi doesn't choke on indexing / searching it?

That was my thought. I knew it couldn't hold it in RAM but thought it would be doing crazy IO and limited by being on SD, but it seems to not be a problem. Like I said, I don't know how ZIM does it, but it does it well. Must have some kind of index that lets it fast travel to the correct blocks or something. I dunno lol.

how capable is the search engine (I assume it has one?)

Yep, it has search. It's....okay but kind of primitive. It's not slow, and if you're searching for something that's fairly unique (as far as keywords go), it does well. But if you're searching something like an acronym where it shows up as a regular word in other entries, it's a lot more hit or miss.