I tried to download tiles by marble for windows and I found more problems:

(1) Download is incredibly slow (servers are probably very busy)

(2) When I tried download tiles for whole Czech republic, level 13 total downloaded tiles takes about 180M, but level 14 takes only about 30M for the same area. When I watch size of folder with level 14, it seems that some tiles are deleted during downloading others in some interval... (?)

(3) Due to OSM tiles-download policy http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy there is not possible/legal/recommended to download level 18 or so...

So I wonder, what is the way to pre-load map for whole country for offline usage with marble?
It seems to me, there is no other way than setup some local renderer and dowload .osm xml file for it. Is it possible to run a mapnik server - ondesktop or even n900 directly? Or use something like http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Maperitive ?