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.
There is the kiwix hotspot.
A WiFi hotspot that gives you access to the entire Wikipedia, medical information, homesteading books …
an extreme option could be something like the Varvara / Uxn virtual machine by the Hundred Rabbits collective (created after having to deal with Adobe updates and Xcode updates over a barely functioning cell connection) – emulators are available for all sorts of hardware
blog: Weathering Software Winter | youtube: Weathering Software Winter
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.
Since this has seen some interest – here’s how much disk space this opulence costs: Arch x86 repository is 113 Gb and Arch ARM is 123 Gb :)
That’s actually much smaller than I expected.
This is going to be controversial but…
Linux is not really suited for the post-apocalitic no-internet world, the way the repositories are built and software is packed (almost nothing is static, a lot of dependencies on other packages everywhere) just makes it really impractical and hard to deal with those scenarios. Flatpak / containers and friends even make this situation worse because you can’t easily mirror the repositories and there’s no straightforward way of exporting a Flatpak as a solid file that can be shared around and installed everywhere - the current tool for that doesn’t account architectures and dependencies very well.
Windows however is a much more solid and good option, yes, it’s painful to hear this but in Windows you can get an exe from a friend in a flash drive and it runs as is. Same goes for installers, reinstalling the OS etc. There’s only a couple of .net framework installers that will cover dependencies for 99.99% of stuff in a few MB. The same goes for macOS, however it depends on a lot of software signing nowadays and certificates that can expire and you then have a problem.
If you can get a few hundred watts of electrical power, StarLink is an option for broadband connectivity via satellite when all the local communications are down. Don’t know why, but Star Link reminds me of Sky Net.
