Kiwix: A Resilient Library of Offline Websites on LoRes Mesh

Preparing a flash drive full of "zim" files

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

If we’re going to store a local copy of Wikipedia, we’re going to need some storage for it.

Wikipedia is over 100GB, for just the English version. The MicroSD Card that you created for the Raspberry Pi is likely not big enough to store it, an in fact we’re not generally going to use that SD card for storing application data for a number of reasons. It’s mostly just for the operating system.

Accessing the flash drive with the Pi

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

When you put flash drive we just prepared in your dev computer, it probably pops up ready to read in your file manager. The Raspberry Pi won’t do that automatically, so we need to set that up.

Plugging it in

Let’s start by plugging the flash drive into one of the USB ports on the Pi. On a Raspberry Pi 5, only two blue USB (type A) ports support the faster USB-3. Providing you have a modern flash drive that supports it, you want to put it in one of those.

Installing the Lores-Kiwix App

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +1000

Kiwix is a great project to make a number of important reference websites, including Wikipedia, readable offline.

Kiwix is available standalone on Co-op Cloud, and is you just install the regular Kiwix recipe, that will display your archives as expected. However, for LoRes Mesh we have provided a special LoRes Kiwix recipe which shares information about which “books” (website archives) it has installed with other nodes in the region.

It looks a lot like installing any app with abra, so let’s go through steps very similar to other Co-op Cloud apps: