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LiberKey applications work on Debian through Wine

Posted on 05. Oct, 2009 by Krishnan.

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There is this beautiful portable suite called LiberKey which is really a collection of hundreds of open source applications for Windows.

For months, I have searched and tried out several portable applications for Windows. None of them even came close to LiberKey in terms of the range, stability and upgrades.

I’ve used LiberKey from the same USB device on both XP and Vista machines with equal ease. You can update LiberKey on XP machine and run it on Vista and viceversa. In fact, I’ve copied LiberKey onto my “C:\Program Files” on Windows drives and I enjoy free updates of all my open source applications.

What was a good Windows solution, has now proven to be a good Linux solution too.

Today, I tried out several LiberKey applications on Debian through the Wine interface and most of them seemed to be working well. The only fall back is that these applications dont work through the Liberkey interface. But rather each application needs to be run from its folder manually. This is not a set back as all it takes is a link to a application to open it.

Debian users sure wont have to miss their little windows programs on GNOME or KDE.

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How to: Carry Wikipedia content on a USB pen drive

Posted on 17. Sep, 2009 by Krishnan.

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This instruction is meant for Windows users.

You’ll need atleast a 16 GB pendrive to carry Wikipedia.

Method 1 : Easy method
For those who are not willing to go through a lot of pain in learning new things, this is the simpler method

First download the latest content from Wikipedia. This is a single file of size 5.1 GB as on today and downloading could take hours.
The latest dump is presently at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2. Copy the downloaded .bz2 file to, say C:\wikipedia.
After this 5.1 GB download is complete, it is necessary to download the software that can read this huge file.
The simplest is wikitaxi. Download Wikitaxi and unzip to the same folder, C:\wikipedia
You should see two executable files now. The wikitaxi executable is the one that should be used to run wikipedia. The wikitaxi importer executable is the one we need to use to convert the .bz2 file downloaded into a .taxi file.
Run the wikitaxi importer executable and let it convert the .bz2 file into a .taxi file. This takes a long time and produces a single 9.2 GB file with a .taxi extension.
Once .taxi file is made run the wikitaxi executable and open the .taxi file. You should be able to browse the content of wikipedia, but with a slightly different look.
Now copy the C:\wikipedia folder to a pendrive and you have a portable version for personal reference.

Method 2: For the geeks
You probably don’t need to read this, but the best way is to clearly to host the entire content on the same platform that Wikipedia does.