The Kiwix Desktop is a viewer/manager of ZIM files for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows OSes.

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.

The Kiwix Desktop application relies on many third party software libraries. The following libraries need to be available:

• libkiwix
• Qt
• 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 18.04+):

sudo apt-get install libqt5gui5 qtbase5-dev qtwebengine5-dev \
     libqt5svg5-dev qt5-image-formats-plugins aria2 \
     qttools5-dev-tools qtchooser qt5-qmake \
     qtbase5-dev-tools

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).

There is initial support for Qt6. Additional packages are needed:

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

And qmake needs to be configured to use Qt6. First confirm qmake is using the right version:

qtchooser -install qt6 $(which qmake6)   # run once
export QT_SELECT=qt6                     # set in environments where Qt6 builds are desired
qmake --version

produces this output:

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

then build as normal:

qmake .
make

To install Kiwix Desktop on the system:

sudo make install

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"

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.

GPLv3 or later, see LICENSE for more details.