Internet-in-a-Box 6.5 Released!

[Adam Holt]

Internet-in-a-Box is a tiny device that brings the best of the Internet to
offline communities around the world — Wikipedia, Khan Academy,
OpenStreetMap, YouTube science videos, thousands of eBooks, etc — no
Internet required!  No longer just a school server, Internet-in-a-Box is
now used in medical clinics in some of the most remote parts of the earth.

Profound thanks to the huge number of contributors who've made
Internet-in-a-Box 6.5 our best yet.  It's a real breakthrough release
already being used in schools around the world — broadly in Mexico, Peru,
Haiti, among others — and in growing number of healthcare contexts,
especially in India.

This release brings many new library fabrication tools to DIY curators (DIY
librarians) who have only the most basic familiarity with GNU/Linux:

   IIAB 6.5 Release Notes
   https://github.com/iiab/iiab/wiki/IIAB-6.5-Release-Notes

Anyone who wants to build their own digital library can now try our 1-line
installers for Raspberry Pi 3 (and 3 B+), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Debian 9
here: (CentOS 7.5 support is highly experimental, if you can help!)

   IIAB 6.5 Download/Install
   http://download.iiab.io/6.5

Then you can install civilization's highest-quality open content, using
easily-downloadable Content Packs, before you install Internet-in-a-Box in
a more fully offline environment.  Choose from Kiwix (ZIM files)
<http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages>, OER2GO/RACHEL
<http://oer2go.org/>, Project Gutenberg <http://www.gutenberg.org/>, WikiHow
<https://www.wikihow.com/> for teens, or choose a Cuban Encyclopedia
<https://www.ecured.cu/> if you prefer!  All this is made easy using
Internet-in-a-Box's *Admin Console* (typically http://box/admin) whose more
advanced capabilities are documented herein:

   http://FAQ.IIAB.IO

It was a long road over 8 months of software development, field testing and
even more intensive QA!  But Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) 6.5 brings many
revolutionary advances, e.g. teachers can now edit ebooks' details in Calibre
3.23 <https://calibre-ebook.com/whats-new>, fixing description translations
and assigning ratings most suitable to their own school.
*Profound thanks to all building out the world's 21st Century Developing
World Libraries AKA Sneakernet-of-Alexandria, as we take the next steps now
together...*


*Time to Enlighten Democracy?*

Civilization’s greatest medical and education sites are next, for 8 billion
hungry minds.  We invite humanitarian hackers, NGOs and publishers to our
OFF.NETWORK hackathons — transforming mind-opening websites — into amazing
offline learning packs.

Also let's finalize our new vector-based approach to OpenStreetMap
<https://github.com/iiab/iiab-factory/pull/32> in offline libraries,
bringing a highly-compressed map of the entire world into almost everyone
hands.  (None of which possible just a decade ago, when we began as One
Laptop Per Child’s school server!)


*Time to Democratize the Enlightenment?*

Local educators then use these learning packs to build up their region’s
redistributable Internet-in-a-Box — unleashing grassroots “fieldback” for
their very own Libraries of Alexandria — of the people, by the people, for
the people…

Let's bring together as many of these grassroots/offline innovators as
possible later in 2018, as we did in August 2017 with financial support
from the Wikipedia Foundation and Learning Equality (KA Lite, Kolibri).
Please get in touch ASAP those who can make it to this important UX summit
and content hackathon, likely to take place in the US or Canada, around
October or November!


*Time to Make it Real, Unleashing Your Own Community Today?*

Some of us will be working with schools in Chiapas, Mexico next week doing
exactly that.  We hope you too build a Little Library of Alexandria,
customizing it for the needs and challenges of your very own neighborhood.

THANK YOU To All who believe in libraries for this entire planet, and are
willing to stand up to make this happen.

Do join our regular community calls restarting in June — supporting each
other bringing educators' and technologists' best ideas together — most
every week Mondays and Thursdays @ http://MINUTES.IIAB.IO
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