friendica.eskimo.com

Selfhost offline software

Recently in Spain we have suffered a complete power outage, with no electricity for a long time.
Some were able to have power on their computers with generators, solar panels, etc.
And I know you can have data connectivity with SDR or HAM radio.
But my question here is, what are some good self-host/local offline software that we can have and use for when something like this happens.
I know kiwix, and some other for manuals. Please feel free to share the ones you know and love, can be for any type of thing as long as it works completely offline, just name it.
Of course for GNU/Linux (using Arch myself BTW).
Thanks in advance.
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im willing to pay up to €100 more or less
can you recommend a kit or just works hardware for meshtastic?
Depends on how good of a setup you want, but you can start for less than €50.
doesn't this one needs a specific set of hardware? is it affordable here in Europe? thanks for sharing, I have heard of this for a long time but didn't get onto it, might look now that this happened
AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren’t really good/solid and won’t save you for sure


I've been using my laptop in areas without internet for days. It works fine.

It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.


I have appimage-run from nixpkgs installed, which handles all those details. They are also not too hard to figure out manually should you need to.

Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you’re missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn’t deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you’re cooked.


GPU drivers are emphatically not part of the AppImage. They are provided by Mesa, which is almost guaranteed to be installed.

Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem


It's actually the other way around - if you want your GPU to work properly on a new Windows install, you have to fish around for AMD/NVidia drivers. On Linux Mesa is pretty much pre-installed on all distros.

It is way more likely that you’ll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.


LMAO, try moving a windows installation from Ryzen+AMD GPU to Intel+NVidia GPU and let me know how it goes (hint: you will have to manually uninstall, and then install a shit ton of drivers, for which you will need internet).

Meanwhile I'm typing this from a (Ryzen+AMD GPU) desktop which has an SSD from my (Intel+integrated graphics) laptop. When I plugged it in, it booted into sway just fine, with complete GPU support and all, and the only reason I had to update my config is to make it more convenient to use on the desktop.

Linux is not the best "apocalypse" OS, but it sure is better than Windows.

This entry was edited (4 hours ago)
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AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren't really good/solid and won't save you for sure. It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.

Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you're missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn't deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you're cooked. Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem. It is way more likely that you'll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.

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There are ways to deal with this. There's AppImage for GUI apps (that replicates the "just get an exe from a friend on a flash drive") and lots of bundling programs for non-GUI apps (I use nix-bundle because I use Nix, but there are other options too).

Lots of distro installers work offline too, by just bringing all the stuff you need as part of the installer.

And one major benefit of Linux is that when stuff does inevitably go wrong, it's infinitely easier to fix than proprietary garbage.

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Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in
this is not true
in fact, most of the machines I have here won't work with a Windows installer .iso or Windows OS itself and some of my hw don't even have drivers for it. So yeah no
meanwhile, most GNU/Linux .iso distro installers have drivers already on the .iso itself, including propietary ones
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I have my homeserver rsync three Arch mirrors and three Arch ARM mirrors in rotation on three days every week. Thus I have full local repos for these. All my machines are configured to use this local repo. The reason I do this is precisely to be prepared for the inevitable 'Internet is broken' scenario.
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Yeah, some people don't like to run with full repo mirrors but keep updated copies of the Debian ISO that can be mounted as repositories at any point:

It's essentially the same, but in another format.

This entry was edited (7 hours ago)
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One can also use a cache to hold deb and rpm files requested by the machines. (Works great when running hundreds of systems. I like "apt-cache-ng". It will do deb and rpm.)
This entry was edited (4 hours ago)