Wikipedia in your pocket

Step 1 Required materials

The major sticking point for this Instructable is that you require a working Psion 5mx. These are comparatively rare, but by no means unobtainable- a quick ebay search revealed 16 on the first page of a search for "psion 5mx". They are not cheap, usually running to around £70, but you may well find one for less, or even free if a friend has one they no longer use.
The other parts can be easily obtained more cheaply- I spent about £15 for all the parts except for the Psion, which was a gift.

You will need: (with approximate cost)

- A working Psion 5mx PDA. Around £70 (ebay), or possibly free if you search enough attics.
- A Compactflash card of at least 1GB- I recommend a 4GB card. £11 (ebay)
- A Compactflash card adapter for your PC, either USB or PCMCIA. £4 (ebay)
- A PC running Linux. If you don't have it installed, I would suggest burning a live CD or making a bootable USB drive for a distribution such as Puppy.
- The archives with which to install Kludged Linux on your Psion. These may be found at Adrian's site here, at the bottom of the page under "download". If his site should disappear, let me know and I will provide my copies for download
- Static HTML dump of Wikipedia.
Text-only dump from 2003 (large file download)
CD distribution of 4,500 good articles with thumbnail images (warning, 750MB file download)
There is a static dump of the entire English language Wikipedia as of June 2008 here: http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/2008-06/en/
- A flask of weak lemon drink

Comments

[dmastachief]

i think your crazy the only ones i can find are like 100 all the way to 800 bucks

[milsorgen]

Have you heard of an exchange rate?

[iectyx3c]

Brilliant!! Love Wikipedia and the idea of an offline version. I mean to try this on my old Psion. Will let you know how it turns out. Thanks for posting this.

[natcrazz]

What other devices can I use for this? Is it anything that will run linux? Would it work on a blackberry? I'm not very experienced with this type of work with computers.

[PKM]

My instructions are largely geared towards doing this with linux on the Psion. It will work with any device that has a browser and enough internal or external storage for the wikipedia dump. If you have a device that already fits those requirements, you just need to unpack the wikipedia dump onto the memory card (see steps 2, 3, 4 and 6). I have resisted the temptation to get a Blackberry so I'm not sure how it would work on one of those, but I don't think they have web browsers so it probably wouldn't. If you have a Blackberry and it does, feel free to correct me.

[upriverpaddler]

I have an HP 660lx that could run Jlime. I'm googling my butt off to do something similar. I came across this for you Psion users.

http://www.pscience5.net/PGG.htm

[jornada660]

How to install jlime - linux on hp palmtop 660lx

http://fz.hobby-site.org/hp660lx/jlime-stable/

http://fz.hobby-site.org/hp660lx/jlime-winter/

Regards

[perlpower]

Current Wikipedia Dump:
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/2008-06/en/
It's 14GB though

[puffyfluff]

I used a friends' broadband internet to download it. It only took five hours.

[FzerozeroT]

This is actually VERY cool, I'm going to do the same on my phone, but probably dumb it down a little for updating purposes. Has this been done before on other devices? I'll do it a little on my Nokia E50, but I'm still waiting on a Neo1979.

[Xial]

I'd wager that something similar to this could be done on a Nintendo DS, though it may lack pictures, since none of the homebrew browsers that I'm aware of can display images. Maybe I should dig out that old 1GB card and give it a run.

[PKM]

Please do- the Guide on a DS would be a whole new level of cool. If you do, I'd love some pictures :)

[Xial]

Bit of a snafu so far, though it'd be overcome by two things:

• More HDD space
• A free 4 GB microSD card. :)
  

I guess I can back up my 2 GB card this weekend, and scrounge up some more HDD space -- maybe I'll put it on my external HDD, and move it over to the other notebook, since this one's almost at capacity.

Then I can start trying to put Wikipedia in my pocket.
I can already tell that I'm going to be limited by space, since my device doesn't support SDHC, but it'll be a fun challenge. It's funny: without doing extra work on the text-only copy of Wikipedia I grabbed from your article, I know I won't be able to fit it and a browser on a 1GB card.

[mpdehnel]

There's a full download from April 2007 here: http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/April_2007/en/ - quite chunky though!!

[slorge]

you are one hoopy frood!