I use OsmAnd~ on Android (available on F-Droid) but there are dozens of alternatives. Speaking of OpenStreetMap, you can also download the OSM data and then use an offline map viewer like JOSM, Mapnik, or Tileserver, the latter two of which are web servers. I don't know of an educational Linux distribution that comes with Kiwix already set up. Maybe some proprietary OSes too, I forget. In addition to desktop Linux, Kiwix runs on Android. Kiwix is packaged in a lot of Linux distributions, including Debian (Buster, Bullseye, Bookworm, and Sid) and Ubuntu. It's the same server running at the site above. The "standard" Kiwix app is a hypertext GUI with a built-in search engine, but you can also run it as a web server that serves up content on, for example, a local network, or just to your browser on the same machine. Or you can download the files, directly or via torrent. You can browse through their packages at and download things like individual books from Project Gutenberg without the Kiwix application. Kiwix has curated¹ as well as complete offline versions of Wikipedia, WikiSource, Stack Overflow, Project Gutenberg (including of course the complete works of Shakespeare), Khan Academy LearnStorm, various other Khan Academy focused collections, TED Talks, CrashCourse, Super User, MathOverflow, Server Fault, lots of other Stack Exchange sites, the OpenStreetMap Wiki, ArchWiki, Ask Ubuntu, etc. Apparently you can still download Encarta 2009 from the internet archive. Perhaps there is an educational Linux distro that includes curated offline versions of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan academy, etc. One of my favorite things about Raspbian is that it includes Mathematica and Sonic Pi. One of my favorite features of macOS is that it still contains a built-in dictionary that you can access even if you're offline.ĭid Rhapsody/Mac OS X ever include the complete works of Shakespeare like NeXT originally did? Given the massive amounts of storage that we have today, I wouldn't mind having a built-in high-quality library of classics and reference works included in every phone, tablet, and PC. As much as I use wikipedia, I still think that shipping a decent curated encyclopedia with every computer/tablet/phone is a fantastic idea. But most of the wealth just went away and all that wonderful constructive product.Įncarta was (and is?) great, and I'm disappointed that Microsoft discontinued it. Now, we still sell the encyclopedias in libraries, making a few million per year doing that. Then a man named Bill Gates came along and he decided that they were going to give away a free encyclopedia with every damn bit of his personal computer software.
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