[reader] Wikireader received

[Doug Jones]

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.