Kiwix Desktop

Kiwix is an offline reader for Web content, primarily designed to make Wikipedia available offline. It reads archives in the ZIM file format, a highly compressed open format with additional metadata. This is the Kiwix Desktop version - a viewer/manager of ZIM files for GNU/Linux (recent versions) and Microsoft Windows 10 & 11 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:

• libzim
• libkiwix
• Qt6
• 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 24.04+):

sudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-base-dev-tools qt6-webengine-dev
     libqt6webenginecore6-bin libqt6svg6

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).

Handling of multiple versions of Qt

If you have many versions of Qt (like older Qt5 for example) installed on your system, qmake might need 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
qmake --version

These command will produce an output similar to:

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

Handling of 'template-id' related compilation errors

Many minor versions of Qt6, have difficulties to compile because of 'template-id' related syntax errors. If your compiler (g++) supports it, you can get rid of these errors by telling the compiler to ignore them with the following command:

qmake QMAKE_CXXFLAGS="-Wno-error=template-id-cdtor" .
make

More info at:

• https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-desktop/issues/1406
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2280366
• https://github.com/RfidResearchGroup/proxmark3/issues/2382
• https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-126989

Compilation on Microsoft Windows

Here is the online documentation.

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"

Debug rendering of a ZIM

kiwix-desktop uses Qt6 WebEngine to render ZIM content, relying on a custom zim: protocol to expose the ZIM data to the Web engine.

To debug issues related to WebEngine, follow these steps:

1. Launch kiwix-desktop with the environment variable QTWEBENGINE_REMOTE_DEBUGGING=<port> set (replace <port> with an available local port number).
2. Open the desired ZIM file in the kiwix-desktop user interface.
3. In a Chromium-based browser, go to: http://localhost:<port>.
4. This opens the remote debugging UI. Use it to access Chrome DevTools connected to the ZIM webpage rendered by WebEngine.

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.

Support

If you're enjoying using Kiwix, drop a ⭐️ on the repo!

License

GPLv3 or later, see LICENSE for more details.