[reader] Wikireader received

Wed Oct 21 01:41:12 CEST 2009

arne anka wrote:
>> For any book that really is text only (for example all those Project
>> Gutenberg books that are simple ASCII text files) all you have to do is
>> create a wiki page on a wiki and dump the text onto the page.
>> i still don't really understand that focus on wiki.
> is it hardcoded into the reader?
>> i'd think apps like plucker would be a far better alternative, not at 
> least because a lot of stuff already exists in plucker format (and others, 
> too) and plucker files are created with way less effort.
> why squeeze everything into a wiki first?

The Wikireader already has a program for displaying wikis.
If you want to port other programs onto this rather small embedded 
device, you are welcome to do so! I hope people do exactly that.
But having never done embedded development myself, I could not even 
begin to guess how long that would take.
I have spent a bit of time looking through the source. It appears to be 
written primarily in C and Forth, two languages I am not fluent in. And 
there is no Linux under there, in fact there is very little that could 
be called an operating system.
For me, and a lot of other Wikireader owners I imagine, writing code to 
run on this device is not really an option. But writing some code that 
runs on a typical desktop system, that converts content into a form that 
the device can use, looks much more like something I can do, and perhaps 
 fairly quickly (especially if somebody jumps in and helps a bit!).
In the last few hours I have succeeded in the following tasks, most of 
which I have never even tried before:
- Installing an empty MediaWiki server on my Ubuntu machine
- Building some wiki pages inside it
- Generating an XML dump from it
(And I haven't had to write any code at all so far)
Next I will try to use the Wikireader development tools to convert the 
XML dump into image files the device can understand. If that works, I 
will copy them onto a blank SD card using the same filenames used by the 
Wikipedia data files, and then copy over the rest of the files from the 
original SD card. Then I stick the new card into the Wikireader, turn 
it on, and see what happens.