As many of you probably know, Wikipedia has been allowing its users to download the entire encyclopedia for quite some time now. That is exactly where Kiwix comes into play. It is an application that allows you to download the whole Wikipedia for offline reading.
Kiwix is particularly useful for users with unreliable Internet connections in that it allows them to have the entire encyclopedia in the hard disk.
Kiwix is basically a browser/reader for offline web content. However, its use is not limited to Wikipedia. It can also be used to download/browse any Wiki-style content such as Wikileaks, UbuntuUsers Wiki and so on. Kiwix supports the ZIM format which is a highly compressed open format that is used to provide offline storage for web content.
Among Kiwix features are:
- Built-in one-click content downloader
- HTML/PDF export
- Full text search engine
- Bookmarks/Notes
- Cross-Platform (Linux, OS X, Windows, Android ...)
- Portable application
- Search suggestion
- ZIM base HTTP server
Installation:
As mentioned above, Kiwix is a standalone application that doesn't require an installation. To run it on Ubuntu, simply download the application's archive (HERE), then invoke the application launcher using the following commands:
cd <EXTRACTED_DIRECTORY>
./kiwix
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