Puppy + Wikipedia on DVD?

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DataPacRat
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Puppy + Wikipedia on DVD?

#1 Post by DataPacRat »

I'm in the early stages of a project proposal, in which various sorts of data are to be copied onto archival-quality DVDs/Blu-Rays and shelved indefinitely, for (much) later future reference. I'm considering throwing (Wary?) Puppy onto at least one disc, and possibly even on every disc - if I can figure out how to do so properly, and have it work.

One of the more popular proposals to try this general idea out is to make a local copy of a reasonably current copy of the English Wikipedia, along with the software to read it. Compressed copies of Wikipedia run around 5-10 gigabytes, which should fit on a Blu-Ray disc, or even a DVD; what I'm hoping to find is whatever software would be necessary to add to Puppy to read any of those archives.

Does anyone reading this know offhand if someone's already accomplished this, and if so, how? If not, how hard would it be to arrange?

My first instinct is to try Kiwix ( http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page ), and one of the pre-indexed ZIM dumps ( http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Template:ZIMdumps ) - but as I still have to read man pages for even the simplest bash commands, I'm not very confident that I'd be able to get, say, an experimental Debian apt-get install package to work on Puppy without breaking something...
Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat
"Then again, maybe I'm wrong."

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darkcity
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#2 Post by darkcity »

Welcome to the forum 8)

You have an interesting project.

I think it is definitely achievable, superattilius got Kiwix working on Slacko and Lucid http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=77458

Any reason why you choose Wary or are you flexible on the puppy version.

If you need help adding menu options etc, I'm sure the forum will help.

---

I'm going to try to install on Slacko from the Slackware repository

---
There is also a topic have (in French)
http://forum.asri.edu.tuxfamily.org/for ... f=30&t=304

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIM_%28file_format%29

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DataPacRat
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#3 Post by DataPacRat »

darkcity wrote:Welcome to the forum 8)

You have an interesting project.
Thank you kindly.

I think it is definitely achievable, superattilius got Kiwix working on Slacko and Lucid http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=77458
Ah, that's good to see - I somehow missed it when I tried searching the forum.

Any reason why you choose Wary or are you flexible on the puppy version.
I'm trying to assume as little as possible about what hardware or emulators will be handy by the time the data is needed. For an equivalent, imagine an equivalent of trying to access data from a VIC-20's cassette drive, today. From my initial look at Puppy's documentation, Wary seemed to be runnable on the most hardware. But since QEMU and VirtualBox are already around, I'm quite willing to chuck my original idea and take any suggestions.

(For related reasons, if I do manage to get Kiwix to work on Puppy, I'd also like to burn a disc containing the full source code, for future reference.)

If you need help adding menu options etc, I'm sure the forum will help.

---

I'm going to try to install on Slacko from the Slackware repository

---
There is also a topic have (in French)
http://forum.asri.edu.tuxfamily.org/for ... f=30&t=304

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIM_%28file_format%29
I'm going to try firing up some version of Puppy on a USB drive to see if I can use either superattilius or the French forum's posts to get Kiwix to work thereon; I've almost finished downloading a ZIM weighing in at 4.2 gigabytes, zipped, to try it out on. (The one at http://download.kiwix.org/portable/kiwi ... ip.torrent , if you're wondering.) If I can get that to work... then the next step would seem to be to take what's on the USB drive and put it on a DVD, at which point I hope I'll be golden.

I'd appreciate any advice or suggestions you may have to offer from your own experience.
Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat
"Then again, maybe I'm wrong."

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Flash
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#4 Post by Flash »

There are several ways to do what you describe. I think the simplest and easiest would be to burn a multisession Puppy on Blu-Ray or DVD, then boot the multisession disk and use Pburn to add the other stuff you want, as separate sessions on the disk. These sessions will then show up as folders when you boot Puppy from the multisession disk and then mount the disk.
Your idea could be expanded by making the multisession Puppy + Wikipedia into a Wikipedia server. You'd have to somehow have Puppy boot as a functioning server with the Wikipedia session already mounted. The Wikipedia session would of course would be on the same disk that multisession Puppy booted from.

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DataPacRat
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#5 Post by DataPacRat »

Flash wrote:There are several ways to do what you describe. I should think that the simplest and easiest would be to burn a multisession Puppy on Blu-Ray or DVD, then boot the multisession disk and use Pburn add the other stuff you want, as separate sessions on the disk. These sessions will then show up as folders when you boot the multisession disk and then mount it.
I'll keep that in mind when I get that far.

Your idea could be expanded by making the multisession Puppy + Wikipedia into a Wikipedia server. You'd have to somehow have Puppy boot as a server with the Wikipedia session already mounted. The Wikipedia session would of course would be the same disk that multisession Puppy booted from.
That's a little more ambitious than I'm aiming for - but if you can get such a setup working, I'll cheerfully use it.

The main project, once I get through this trial-run with Wikipedia, is to end up with a library of discs which contain somewhat arbitrary text, video, audio, and image files; and enough present-day software to read them, even if a particular format's specs have fallen into the bit bucket by the time these discs are read.

For the Wikipedia pilot, if Kiwix will get the job done, I'll use it; if turning Puppy into a Wikipedia server will work, I'll use it. A good part of the point for this is to get myself familiarized with getting such an OS installed and working on a random disc, so that when I've got the contents for the main discs lined up, I can just stick an appropriate version of Puppy (or DSL, or Slitaz, or whatever I eventually manage to get working) on 'em and fill the rest of the space with the various media, which can be read/watched/etc with Puppy's applications when the time comes.
Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat
"Then again, maybe I'm wrong."

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DataPacRat
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#6 Post by DataPacRat »

The SFS for Kiwix installed into Slacko on a USB without a hitch, and I'm starting to get a bit used to Puppy. I think I'm just about good to go; I'm mostly trying to fiddle around with tweaks now, trying out different packages, looking for any ways to save space, and so on. Once I've got a hang of the quirks, I'll try burning some DVDs.

In short - I think I'm just about good to go.
Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat
"Then again, maybe I'm wrong."

raffy
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use puppy, save space

#7 Post by raffy »

Puppy uses sfs (compressed) for its files. If you want to have (say, wikipedia) a part of Puppy, make it part of the filesystem (in /opt or /root) then remaster. You will then have a very large sfs (in the ISO) that has both Puppy and Wikipedia.

If you want to have Wikipedia sfs separately, put the files in a folder (in a Linux partition), say, in /working

/working/opt/wikipedia

then in terminal

mksquashfs /working wikipedia.sfs

That will take some time (and make sure you have space on the partition), and result to wikipedia.sfs that you can use the same way you use openoffice.sfs (load it with bootmanager and reboot).
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

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