I know that several members of this forum use Wikipedia.  This guy created some tools to read Wikipedia offline.

http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html

The tools he used were all open source Linux packages, so it only works in Linux.  The front-end is python, which is cross-platform, so a Windows version is possible.  Anyone know of existing tools for Windows?

MrMagoo wrote on Aug 14^th, 2007 at 2:12am:

Anyone know of existing tools for Windows?

The classic: cygwin. For extra credit, look up the name "Mike Tiemann".
Alternatively, a derivative of the above sans the common DLL: mingw.

I like Wikipedia .. not only for its content, but also the *idea* of it > lotsa people contributing their expertise  .. on a vast number of topics > the basis for why the web is so cool (& powerful).

In order to view off-line, you would have to download files.

Can't imagine needing to do ANYthing offline.

Most ppl, I'm sure, use Wikipedia.

wrote on Aug 14^th, 2007 at 3:22am:

The classic: cygwin.

cygwin is a great Linux emulator, and would work well for this task, but I was looking for something natively Windows.  Thanks for the suggestion, though.


Quote:

In order to view off-line, you would have to download files.

Very true.  And it currently weighs in at 4.9 GB, which is hefty, but not unreasonable, and it would be extremely useful on a laptop in several circumstances - such as traveling somewhere where Internet access is spotty but I still need to do some research.  My computer feels almost broken without Internet access, but it still happens occasionally.

http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070802/

It might also be nice for some academic institutions to have a local copy.  The school could download the dump at night when bandwidth use is low and then everyone could use the local copy during the day.  Other situations exist where accessing it online is either inconvenient or not possible.

MrMagoo wrote on Aug 14^th, 2007 at 8:31pm:

cygwin is a great Linux emulator

No, it's a POSIX emulator. POSIX existed before Linux, you know; I wrote most of the POSIX support for an OS called Coherent in the early 90's, and I was doing my own ports of GCC in the late 80's (for a ROMable UNIX kernel I wrote myself back then for the 68k), and I find this kind of bogus assertion really irritating.


MrMagoo wrote on Aug 14^th, 2007 at 8:31pm:

but I was looking for something natively Windows

There are native versions of almost every individual tool, but they are not generally collected (outside of LAMP stack collections like XAMPP) because each individual toolmaker maintains their own ports - see http://www.python.org/download/ for instance. If you want a specific tool in a Windows version, just Google it.

Tools such as HTTrack (Windows/Linux/Unix) or SurfOffline (Windows) might be a solution?

Thanks, Pleo.  That's a completely different way of going about it, but might provide what I need.  


wrote on Aug 15^th, 2007 at 4:27am:

If you want a specific tool in a Windows version, just Google it.

I'm familiar with googling for tools, but it is often time consuming to determine which of the many results google returns will work reasonably well.  I was hoping someone was already familiar with something.  Thanks for your help, though; I'm well on my way to making it work now.