Hi
The Kiwix team is proud to publish the first version of its Kiwix-plug installer (also called Pibox installer). A tool with both command line and graphical user interface to easily setup a Kiwix-plug on a RaspberryPi.
Using a PC on Windows/MacOS/Linux and having a good connection to internet, you can with a few mouse clicks configure a SD card for a RaspberryPi3. You then just have to wait (The Windows version is still really slow due to the virtualisation) to get your offline library WIFI hotspot with the content of your choice.
Give it a try, just download Kiwix-plug installer from here: https://download.kiwix.org/release/kiwix-plug_installer/v1.0/
Software code is open-source, please open tickets if you have any bug/question/remark: https://framagit.org/ideascube/pibox-installer
Do you want to know more?
Kiwix plug is a portable server. With it, you can create a local network and deliver content to users. Kiwix plug allows you to share files easily: once they are connected to the Kiwix network, content is available for anybody through their own Web browser.
Kiwix-plug has been created 5 years ago and integrated first kiwix-serve, the HTTP daemon serving ZIM files and a custom based set of system scripts and HTML pages. It has been distributed in hundreds of schools and cultural centers, mostly in Africa but not only. This is, for example, the solution on which ran the devices distributed within the WikiFundi project. You can find a few more technical details here http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Kiwix-plug.
Kiwix-plug installer v1.0 is not only a disrupting new way of creating this kind of offline libraries, it is also a new solution motorising the Kiwix-plug. Using Ideascube (https://framagit.org/ideascube/ideascube), we have been able to provide a much nice user interface and fix many of our long standing bugs.
Kiwix-plug installer v2.0 is already in development and its release is planned in a few weeks. The features will be really similar, but the overall speed/performance will be greatly improved.
We are also working on a cloud version of the Pibox-installer, allowing to create the SD card images from a web page... but we will tell you more about that in an other email :)
Regards Emmanuel