
Pausing a download now changes its state to PAUSE_REQUESTED and the pause request is enqueued for asynchronous execution. Similarly, resuming a download changes its state to RESUME_REQUESTED and the resume request is enqueued for asynchronous execution. In the PAUSE_REQUESTED and RESUME_REQUESTED states download actions are disabled. Known issues: - The PAUSE_REQUESTED state may be incorrectly restored to DOWNLOADING if at the time of pausing an earlier UPDATE request for the same download preceded it in the queue or was being executed. After the response to the said UPDATE request is received it results in the DownloadState being reset to the previous state. But after the pause request is processed a subsequent UPDATE request will change the state to PAUSED. In GUI this looks as follows (assuming slow responses from aria2c, allowing to observe the events in slow motion): 1. Pause button is pressed 2. Pause button and download progress info (the textual one) disappear 3. Pause button and download progress info (the textual one) re-appear 4. Download switches to paused state without any further user actions A similar problem exists for resuming the download. The solution is to convert the request queue to a priority queue where download actions are given precedence over update actions. However this will not eliminate the problem completely since a pause/resume action may be issued while an update request is being processed by aria2c (the likelyhood of which greatly increases if aria is mostly stuck struggling with slow storage). The latter case will be addressed by tracking the timestamps of the requests and ignoring the download status from those update requests that were issued before the user action requests.

Kiwix Desktop
The Kiwix Desktop 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 Desktop application relies on many third party software libraries. The following libraries need to be available:
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 18.04+):
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
Compilation
Once all dependencies are installed, you can compile Kiwix Desktop:
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 Qt6
There is initial support for Qt6. Additional packages are needed:
sudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-base-dev-tools qt6-webengine-dev libqt6webenginecore6-bin libqt6svg6
And qmake
needs to be configured to use Qt6. First confirm qmake
is using the right version:
qtchooser -install qt6 $(which qmake6) # run once
export QT_SELECT=qt6 # set in environments where Qt6 builds are desired
qmake --version
produces this output:
$ qmake --version
QMake version 3.1
Using Qt version 6.2.4 in /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu
then build as normal:
qmake .
make
Installation
To install Kiwix Desktop on the system:
sudo make install
Run
To run Kiwix Desktop
kiwix-desktop
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
- 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.