Kiwix Linux/Windows

The Kiwix Linux/Windows is a viewer/manager of ZIM files for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows OSes.

Disclaimer

This document assumes you have a little knowledge about software compilation. If you experience difficulties with the dependencies or with the Kiwix library compilation itself, we recommend to have a look at kiwix-build.

Dependencies

The Kiwix application relies on many third party software libraries. The following libraries need to be available:

• libkiwix
• Qt
• aria2

These dependencies may or may not be packaged by your operating system. They may also be packaged but only in an older version. The compilation script will tell you if one of them is missing or too old. In the worst case, you will have to download and compile a bleeding edge version by hand.

Libkiwix has to be compiled dynamically, the best way to have it is to use kiwix-build.

Install needed packages (on Ubuntu 22.04+):

sudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-base-dev-tools qt6-webengine-dev \
     libqt6webenginecore6-bin libqt6svg6 qt6-speech-flite-plugin \
     qt6-speech-speechd-plugin  qt6-speech-flite-plugin

Compilation

qmake needs to be configured to use Qt6:

qtchooser -install qt6 $(which qmake6)   # run once
export QT_SELECT=qt6                     # set in environments where Qt6 builds are desired

First confirm qmake is using the right version, this should produces this output:

$ qmake --version
QMake version 3.1
Using Qt version 6.2.4 in /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu

Once all dependencies are installed, you can compile Kiwix:

qmake .
make

qmake will use pkg-config to locate libraries. Depending on where you've installed libkiwix (and other libraries) you may have to update the env variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH. It can be set as follows, for example, for x86-64 native systems:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="<...>/BUILD_native_dyn/INSTALL/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig"

You may want to simply open the kiwix-desktop project in QtCreator and then compile the project from there (don't forget to update PKG_CONFIG_PATH if necessary).

Compilation with Qt5

It is still possible to compile using Qt5, following packages are needed:

sudo apt-get install libqt5gui5 qtbase5-dev qtwebengine5-dev \
     libqt5svg5-dev qt5-image-formats-plugins aria2 \
     qttools5-dev-tools qtchooser qt5-qmake \
     qtbase5-dev-tools libqt5texttospeech5-dev

qmake needs to be configured to use Qt5:

qtchooser -install qt5 $(which qmake5)   # run once
export QT_SELECT=qt5                     # set in environments where Qt5 builds are desired
qmake --version

then build as normal:

qmake .
make

Compilation on Microsoft Windows

Here is the online documentation.

Installation

To install Kiwix on the system:

sudo make install

Run

To run Kiwix:

kiwix

You might have to refresh the ld database before:

sudo ldconfig

If you face problems such as library not found..., add the following environment variable:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="<...>/BUILD_native_dyn/INSTALL/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu"

Communication

Available communication channels:

• Web Public Chat channel
• Email
• Mailing list
• Slack: #android channel Get an invite
• IRC: #kiwix on irc.freenode.net

For more information, please refer to https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication.

License

GPLv3 or later, see LICENSE for more details.