920b34a9fd
When trying to display resources from an invalid ZIM file that fail to be retrieved due to problems with the ZIM data, now an HTML error page is returned instead. Note that the resource being accessed may in fact be an image, a CSS or a javascript file and the user may not see the error (though the appearance of the webpage trying to load and use that resource will be affected to various degrees).
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.