The Kiwix-desktop is a view/manager of zim files for GNU/Linux and Windows. You can download and view your zim files as you wish.

This document assumes you have a little knowledge about software compilation. If you experience difficulties with the dependencies or with the Kiwix libary compilation itself, we recommend to have a look to kiwix-build.

The kiwix-desktop application relies on many third parts software libraries. Following libraries need to be available:

• kiwix-lib ...................... https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-lib/
• Qt .............................................. https://www.qt.io/
• aria2 ..................................... https://aria2.github.io/

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 worse case, you will have to download and compile bleeding edge version by hand.

kiwix-lib has to be compiled dynamically, the best way to have it is to use kiwix-build.

Install needed packages (on Ubuntu):

$ sudo apt-get install libqt5gui qtbase5-dev qtwebengine5-dev libqt5svg5-dev qt5-image-formats-plugins qt5-default aria2

Once all dependencies are installed, you can compile the kiwix-desktop with:

qmake .
make
make install

qmake will use pkg-config to locate libraries. Depending of where you've installed kiwix-lib (and other libraries) you may have to update the env variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

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).

GPLv3 or later, see COPYING for more details.