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What is Kiwix? I looked into this fascinating software as I wanted to have a copy of the Arch Wiki on hand offline. Yes I know that you can do something from the command line but I would be happier with a program that looked like a web page if that makes sense. Arch has a kiwix-desktop application within which you can download the Arch Wiki or any of 4003 web site sections or books as they are called and view them. https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/kiwix-desktop/ https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-desktop Setting up was easy. Download the kiwix-desktop then download the Arch Wiki book and you are up and running. Here is a freshly opened Kiwix. As you can see you can resize the the window to suit. I have also added a couple of extra books to kiwix. With fast stable internet kiwix may not be necessary. However if you bork your os and can not get on line or get a connection gremlin or internet outage kiwix may just save the day. You could download whatever content you fancy and turn of your router/modem for an afternoon whilst you peruse, thus saving a few shillings worth of electricity. There are other uses for kiwix and Arch has a range of kiwix programs available. These will allow you to view .zim files you have made from your own choice of web sites. I noticed that the Futurama offering at Kiwix was from 2017 so I went to the site and used Zimit to make an uptodate file. https://youzim.it/ Once the site had been zimmed I downloaded the file and tried to read it from kiwix-desktop. However it could not be read from that program. There is some information regarding this at the Zimit site. Although Arch has all the tools needed to set up a server, there is even a Docker offering I could not be bothered with all the fafff. Luckily for me though I came across this, Kiwix JS PWA This allows you to view .zim files offline in a browser. A few clicks later and I have the latest copy of the Futurama Infosphere site available for offline perusal. Using Kiwix JS PWA was just a tad glitchy to start with but it seems to have settled down and is working well. I pulled the ethernet cable from the pc to see if offline worked and it did with no problems. I could change which book/site I wanted to with no problems, going form Futurama to the Arch Wiki and back again. There is more to this tale but it will have to wait for another day.

Raspberry Pi has released a version of linux that can be run on Windows PCs. It is based on Debian and called Pixel OS. http://thehackernews.com/2016/12/raspberry-pi-pixel-os.html So I know there are some bleeding edge people out there willing to test it live and offer some comments.

Hey y'all, It's been a very very very long time since I've poked my head in here. The last time I checked in, I was truly about to ask for help from our late friend Bruno before noticing the unforunate post of his passing. And sadly, I haven't had much time to check in more frequently for a long while now since then. -- ....5 minutes passes... hmm, alrighty, time to move past this awkward silence-- So, I got a Rasberry Pi for Christmas. Yeah!! Only to be bummed out with the lack luster of information. How does it hold up to a Pentium II/III? So, after extensive Googling, I finally found and know how the boot process works - for a single Linux distro on a single SD card. While I like both for their strengths, I like NOOBS a bit more because, from what I've gathered, it can use any distro with little modification. I like BerryBoot for it's built-in networking and ability to use an external USB HDD. What I want: a Raspberry Pi to network, multiboot, and partition like a PC does with multiple distros and retain data with a local shared storage area using an external HDD. I suppose network storage (NAS ) would also be an option. Swapping SD cards could wear out the mechcanism or damage the SD slot. So I've used LILO and GRUB (GRUB is a bit easier to edit and modify, imo) on the PC, thus this post. Currently I'm looking for and wanting a better educational discussion and explanation of the underlying concepts and softwares used that enable NOOBS and BerryBoot to work as they do. What I think I understand: BerryBoot has it's own kernel (think of it as a kind of DOS, you know prior to Windows 98... err, oh wait, Windows ME/98/95/3.11 were all built on top of DOS). Well you get the picture. BerryBoot has it's own "local" library set that the other distros then need to use. But the distros made available and presented with BerryBoot are a bit hacked themselves and subsequently squashed (no, really, they use SquashFS). For explorating OSs, it's great up until you hit a wall. Is it even a real problem?? I don't know, but I want more space for local system files - a distro for each configuration because I can't afford multiple Rasberry Pis (at the moment). Maybe I don't understand the SquashFS and how it works. But it seems to me that it's a fixed size partition that's hard to update and hard to grow. It seems to me that NOOBS incorporates a modified version of GRUB that then directs the CPU to boot a given distro on a given partition. I just wish that partition was on an external USB HDD (but so far it doesn't support external USB HDD devices). Distros based on NOOBS can expand the image to use the remaining portion of the SD card. I want more room, even if it's just 250MB to 500MB more than the stock image, but I don't want it to take up the entire 16GB or 32GB SD card. That process to expand an image is not very clear and to my knowledge will not work with BerryBoot. I guess that's what I have for now for my questions. But I'm sure I'll have more. Oh yeah, I did post this question in similar form (or so I thought) at the raspberrypi.org forums (which somehow got turn around into me hating both methods of multibooting).