Episode: 1496
Title: HPR1496: wiki on the raspberry pi
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1496/hpr1496.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:14:05

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Hello and welcome Hacker Public Radio Audience. My name is Mr. Rex. I'll let you start
by thanking the people at Hacker Public Radio for making this service available. Without
it, I would never have produced a podcast. If you've got some sort of passion or hobby
or something, why not share it with the rest of us? I'm sure we'd love to hear it.
Well, this is my seventh podcast. Not them counting in their stand, but it's going
to be a bit free-flowing, so there were a lot of ums and errors and whatnot in it, so I must
apologise straight away for that. But I've been playing around with something here and
though it was just fresh, my mind I would record about it. It's really regarding, it's
all about getting a wiki onto my Raspberry Pi. I've got three Raspberry Pi's in the house,
in fact. I remember when the Raspberry Pi first came out, how keen I was to get hold of
one, sitting on the website, trying to, with the retry button on the day, it first came
out, trying to get one, and invariably I failed and had to wait another month or so until
I got finally got to one through the post. But I can't remember, I think I've been
going to be got two actually. No, I'm not missing one. Anyway, I ended up with two eventually,
and they were both the 256K models, and invariably the 512 KB model came out, and I thought,
well, some of the things I'm doing with the Pi is stretching the memory, it'd be great
to have a 512, so about a third one. And one of the two remaining Pi's was going to
have picked to the side, and I used this for experimenting and stuff like that, so it's
not, that was not used very much now. So the main two ones I've got, one under the television
used as a media server, we're running XBMC, and the 512 megabyte one is used for various
things. And in fact, I think when I was looking at logs, I'm actually downloaded something
like 170 gigabytes of information through the Pi, and that's going to be 16 gigabyte,
I'd obviously have a copy of it, but it seems to be a remarkably robust platform, and
of course, it uses a tiny amount of power, so it's really great. And so some of the applications
are running on the Pi's quite demanding, and I had first experienced with Wikis, was
with Wiki. Which is, if you look up, they provide Wiki's that you can register and pay
a price, and what not, and get your own Wiki. When I first signed up for Wiki. It was
actually free, I think it was a pull-us-chap, a pull-us developer that produced it, and
I was wanting to give a free Wiki to the world, I think that was what it was all about.
But I think you eventually sold it, and it's now pretty commercial, so you've got to pay
it for the service, but the people who first joined Wiki.early in the beginning, they
remained with a free service, so I've been very lucky, and I've got this free Wiki.Service
for myself, it's very good. And that was all good and great, and always at the back of
my mind I was a bit concerned, what happened with Wiki.Disappeared, and I've got a lot
of stuff there up, and Wiki.seemed to lose it. There's actually a service whereby you
can pull out the text from the Wiki site, and it's stored in a zip file, so you can use
it on another site, and obviously there's differences between Wiki markup, and you might
need to do a bit of translation, but you're listening to your information out. That's
all good and well, and I thought about using something like Ducky Wiki on the Raspberry
Pi, and I just went and installed Ducky Wiki on my Spear Raspberry Pi, and I just took
the default options from installed it, and I think the default is to use Apache, although
I think you can also use LightHTTP if it is, and I took Apache, and it worked fine on
the Spear Pi, it just did to fill it out with, and it's fairly full-featured, and I missed
about that, but I never really finished transferring all my notes of stuff from Wiki.To Ducky
Wiki, but I also use various notes as well online, and these notes became unavailable
a couple of times, and I thought, well, this is a bit, it's used for lost all that, so
again I thought, well I could do getting this, I use these notes all the time, unlike Wiki
Ducky Ducky, which I only go to occasionally, and so I thought, well why am I going to get,
I don't really want to put to Ducky Wiki on my Raspberry Pi because it's quite heavy
with Apache, and you know, you're clicking a link, and there's a bit of a delay when it
is it, as it goes to the link and whatnot, so it's obviously, it's obviously using quite
a lot of resources as well, so how do we search on through AppGet, and how do I look to
see what kind of Wiki applications were available on the Debian repository, and I stumbled
across an application called Dedy Wiki, and when I had a bit of a look about it, it seemed
like the project was kind of dead, I remember hearing Mad Dog talking about how people say
that there's all these thousands of projects that are just abandoned or whatever, and he says,
no, it's just thousands of complete projects, just because it's abandoned doesn't mean
it isn't complete, so anyway, I gave, I thought it was an interesting distinction, I had
to go at installing Dedy Wiki, actually there's one thing I've forgot to mention that, particularly
I caught my about Dedy Wiki was the fact that it's got its own built-in web server, I think
the application itself is under 25k, so it's tiny, so that really appealed to me as well,
so to install it you just see the AppGet install Dedy Wiki, and that's it, and then to run the
thing, Dedy Wiki Space Dash L, and then the IP address you'd want to use, say something like
1N2.168.1.5, whatever, and then I use Dash P for port and then 8000, if there's an example,
and then you just point your browser at 1N2.168.1.5 colon 8000, and up it comes,
and it's really great, it's super fast, lightning fast, you got a Wiki home page appears,
she's welcome to Dedy Wiki, Dedy Wiki is a small and simple Wiki web implementation,
it is intended for personal note-taking to do this, and any other you should think of,
to learn more about what a Wiki Wiki web is, read about why Wiki works and Wiki nature also
consult the Wiki Wiki web fact, and so on, there's a view more about that and whatnot,
as you see I didn't really do any research about Dedy Wiki, it's just something I wanted to
open up and running fast, you know, quickly, and it certainly does that, but it's super light,
and it's super responsive on the Raspberry Pi, so along the top you've got Wiki home,
you've got an edit link, which allows you to web edit the homepage, which is what first comes up,
you've got changes, you've got new and you've got help, and you've got to create a new page,
you can create a new page kind of automatically by editing the home page and starting with
the word Wiki in the capital letters, so Wiki, and then another word joined onto the word Wiki,
but it's also starting with the capital letters, seems to work, so for example, you could have
Wiki notes, for example, something with a capital N, and then when you save that page,
you then click on the link that you've created called Wiki notes, and that creates a brand new
page, ready for you to paste stuff into, you save that, and on you go, it's very, very easy,
when you go to the help section, it gives you some, it gives you help about
formatting and what, and it is a bit basically Wiki, it's not a fully featured fat Wiki,
or anything like that, but you've got various level headings, you can set up,
horizontal lines, you can put them in, bold, italics, underscore text, strike through,
combination of bold and italics, you can have auto-generated Wiki links, which are explaining
just how we do, external links, forced Wiki links, I should say, named HTTP links,
you can embed link to graphics, can do bullet lists, a numbered lists, and tables,
so it's really quite useful, you also search, you can do a search on your Wiki, on your Wiki
and it'll find a simple search, I hope I actually tried that,
see what happens, oh yes, it gives you a list of pages that contain the word you've searched on,
you click on changes, what does that do, all right, list the name of pages that have changed
and they told there were the date on the end, so yeah, it says great, super light, super fast,
there's no log in, you know, not going to use a name or password, log in and like that,
so it would just be within your own local network, but it's just great, super fast, super light
weight, don't even notice it's running on the thing, I guess only thing I need if SWOTD is
make sure that it starts at boot, it warns or not, I think it warns or not, if you look up
Wiki, obviously you want to run it, it's not as a normal user, you definitely don't run this
as a root user, so you want it to start as a normal user, that boot up for convenience,
I haven't done that yet, but I'll get to that in the near future, the pages are stored in plain
text and the user's home directory under dot ddwiki, it's just plain text, very simple to
to back up and move elsewhere if need be, what I did was I copied the text from my notes online
and then I created a page using the procedure I mentioned before and then on the new page,
it just pasted the text into it and saved button, so for example, this would create a text
file called Wiki Notes within the dot ddwiki directory and then what I would do is I used
cp, space, wiki notes, space, wiki notes dot back, so that basically copied the text
to a backup file and then what I did was I used a side script and which tweaked the text,
does it auto editing for it, it basically looked for bold and underline HTML tags and
convert them to Wiki format by putting stars, moving the angle bracket B and U, whatever,
for bold and underline and replacing with a star and an underscore, for example, things,
simple things like that and so you would just, in the dot ddwiki directory, I used the command
said space-f for file and then the script file in my case, I called it said dash notes dash
ddwiki, so that was the text file containing the said commands which would translate the bold
and underline to stars and underscores or whatever as need be and then space less than sign
and Wiki notes which was the input file, then space greater than sign, space,
sorry, that got that wrong, it was actually, let me start that again, so it was just the said command
said space-f and then the script file which was in this case said dash notes dash ddwiki and so
that was the script that the translation from my notes to ddwiki and the input file would use
space less than and Wiki notes dot back, so it would use the dot back file to as an input file
in space greater than sign Wiki notes and that was the output file and then that would just
translate the text from HTML to Wiki markup using said, I was just very basic said script
that nothing fancy, I've not done anything particularly clever with said but certainly
very useful and saves a lot of manual editing and whatnot, anyway I hope you found that
interesting and it's well worth a look, if you've got Raspberry Pi and you need a Wiki site
quickly, excellent, anyway I've got a chance I'll maybe put some some show notes together,
I'll see how it goes, if you want to contact me I can be contacted contact with that Mrx
AT, that hpr at googlemail.com Mrxat that's AT, hpr the at symbol googlemail.com, so until next time
thank you and goodbye.
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