this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

You can download a collection of thousands (maybe a million I don't even know) of books in Spanish in epub format, from the "secret library". It's like a 100Gb torrent, but way worth it.

Ebooks tens to have long lasting battery. I spent a few hours reading on monday.

Just now I'm on my phone, but if you are interested let me know and I'll try to find the link and will mp it to you if you want.

And just now I've been thinking that epubs being so small size maybe there's a way to transmit them over this radio mesh networks on demand, like some sort of radio library. I've have to look into that. Maybe they are too big for that as radio bandwidth for data transfer tends to be incredibly small.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

You mentioned ham radio


definitely fun! It's a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF ("walkie talkie"-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power ("QRP") it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup...

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

thanks, really appreciate all the recommendations here :) i got myself an RTL-SDR because a friend told me about them (didn't arrived yet) definitely gonna check on all that you talk about too

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

https://freifunk.net/

An independent mesh network in Germany.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

does it work in Spain though?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 minutes ago

There are Spanish equivalents yes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Concept and hardware would. Just need >1 nodes

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 minute ago

total respect

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

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-cacher-ng". It will do deb and rpm. https://wiki.debian.org/AptCacherNg

https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/

Edit: better link

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

Caches expire, eventually.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

good one thanks, will RTFM for this

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

There's a whole community for self hosting software.

[email protected]

Hopefully I did that right...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

thanks, will crosspost there. I didn't saw that one

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Downloading all of wikipedia for one language is abiut 90GB. Inhave it on a spare drive in case of an outage. That way if I need to research something I can still do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Doesn't Kiwix already do this? Or is there any advantage in doing it myself?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

I guess the advantage would be to have a more updated copy, because the ones on kiwix are one year old.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

You can put together a media server and build a catalogue so you can watch movies and series offline. Maybe not a huge priority in that situation but definitely nice to have.

Jellyfin is a good option for streaming from a media server to other devices. The *arr suite is an option for building the catalogue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

yes, thanks. I already have a server here with Jellyfin, but I recently moved to a new house and have to put it all back again

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago

Spain? check guifi.net ;)

People had LAN Partys playing video games "offline" in the 90s... Setting up a network is easy, the difficulty comes from scaling up to many nodes, and spreading through the geography (e.g. if you were to use antennas for WLAN, they would need a mostly unobstructed vision) which in urban areas gets tricky.

But those "topology" issues can be flattened, e.g. you can always have a raspberry pi (or any device) acting as server in the corner of a neighborhood. A virtual bulletin board, emails, etc. all could be self-hosted locally there and then people could go grab a coffee and consume the local news just like in the middle ages, but with a screen, digital assets and some healthy amount of trolling :P

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago

Also Reticulum Network Stack! Much more ambitious than Meshtastic.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

Yes, it requires hardware

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago

Navigation on Android: Osmand lets you download and cache OSM data so you can use it offline. Cache is unlimited if you download Osmand via F-Droid.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
  • Audiobookshelf: Audiobooks
  • Navidrome: Music
  • Jellyfin: Movies, videos, audio and books
  • Radicale: calendar, contacts and tasks
  • Nextcloud: all files and more
  • HomeAssistant: for managing the solar panels, battery and other iot
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 hours ago (8 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Offline repository caches for Linux have been a thing for decades. People absolutely pass binaries to friends.

Flatpac may not be suitable, but that is only one way to get software on Linux.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm just saying you need a deal with a bunch of complexities that in the post-apocalyptic wont be pretty.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

might be true, i won't discuss that. But im willing to have alternatives, have my own mirrors etc whatever is needed

what I'm not willing to use is propietary software so more than controversial, you are just not being helpfull

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