I just uploaded a DVD ISO image (bzip2, ca. 1GB; ~1.3BG uncompressed) to
the wikipedia server. It contains a snapshot of the German wikipedia,
including images, for offline browsing under Window$. It can be found at
http://download.wikimedia.org/wp_de_2004_05.iso.bz2
It comes with a self-written installer (hereby under GPL, will upload
source soon) for the webserver software. You can choose if you want to
copy the database and/or the images to the hard drive as well, or leave
them on DVD. For the fulltext search to work, I highly recommend to copy
the database to HDD.
Get it to work:
1. Decrompress the ISO image
2. Burn the ISO image to DVD
3. Run the Installer
4. Go to the installation directory and run "start.bat" (twice if it
doesn't show the homepage right away)
5. To shut down the local web server, run "stop.bat"
As the pages are generated on-the-fly from a sqlite database, and that
generation is done by a relatively new C++ software, many little bugs
are to be expected. Math display doesn't work at all.
Note that when copying the database to HDD, one can actually edit,
preview and save pages!
I consider this more a proof-of-principle rather than a product
distributable on a large scale, but I strongly believe it is an
important step in the right direction.
Some things I'd suggest for further development:
* Auto-update to current online version via internet
* Sumbitting offline edits to the online version
* Another web server that runs directly from CD/DVD (no need for
installation)
* Linux and Mac software, running on the same data
BTW: Does anyone know a filesystem compression software that runs under
Windows and doesn't require manual installation? If we could reduce
database/image size by 50%, it would all fit on a CD again (for now).
I'll be on vacation for two weeks, starting tomorrow, so I might not
answer to all suggestions/criticism right away.
Magnus
P.S.: An alternative would probably be a static HTML dump and
HouseSpider (
http://freshmeat.net/projects/housespider/?branch_id=28546&release_id=1…
), but it requires Java.