[fastrobot]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Well, you are probably actually relying on them following the law in your area and the agreement they have with you. My experience with Kobo is they are willing to help.

I am not in litigation with them at this time. I just don't want to get into a bad situation when the support so far has been abysmal.

That's not my experience. I have submitted several problems using Firefox with no problems. And my dealing with Kobo have been good. Yes, they work from a script and that caused an extra cycle of responses, but I got what I wanted each time.

Weird, it still doesn't work here.
Are you running a Linux version of Firefox, or Windows ?

Unfortunately, it doesn't work this way. I tested on one of my devices with a different account and changing the password does not invalidate the access from the device. When I found this, the first thing I did was to report it as a bug to Kobo. Hopefully they will see that it is a problem and fix it.

Awesome! At least someone can contact them!!!
WoooHOOO!

Well, I have no idea what you are doing wrong. I also have bought several Kobo devices. Usually I plug them into my laptop to do the update so that I can use the keyboard. But, I deliberately didn't do this with my Aura H2O and Glo HD. Both setup without errors.

I don't know either. I doubt the USA has internet restrictions or blocking that are different than Australia, but it's weird that I'm having this much trouble if you aren't. I've ordered a new wireless card to see if maybe it's my router's wireless that's the problem; I was going to use a USB dongle, but the KOBO doesn't notice a regular USB dongle unless it's in hotspot mode even though Linux will route a dongle in peer mode or hotspot mode.
SO the particular wireless dongles I have are useless with a KOBO...

But I still think it's just bugs in their software someplace... Let me give you a more complete example:

My KoboGlo has been running 3.12.0 (I think, don't remember for sure -- but it is definitely older than 3.12.1.) and I haven't synced it in roughly two months but have never had problems with it before except the very first time I tried to log in. Now I realize I spoke too soon...

So, I tried to sync it the last couple of days because I had bought more books on my AuraHD, and wanted my Glo to have the same desktop; but strangely the sync failed and complained about an unknown error three quarters through the sync (the bar going across the top of the KOBO). I thought it was just network traffic, so I tried again several times over two days. I hit rescan, reconnected, everything reported as being fine -- but when I hit, 'sync', it failed again; so I logged out, logged back in which took a while; and It still failed.. But -- yesterday I noticed that it would happily let me download books that were purchased over two months ago and the GLO knew about because it was synced back then...


So, I tried pushing sync on my AuraHD, and it had no problems at all.

So, I thought -- Maybe it's firmware support being dropped for the older version and auto-update is failing ? So, I downloaded kobo-update-3.15.0.zip on my desktop, unpacked it in the Glo's .kobo directory, hit the reboot and watched the screen say 'updating', I didn't watch to make absolutely sure it completed but, when I came back and touched the screen home -- and the normal screen with all my books came back as usual. I logged out/in, and tried sync -- and everything is fine. It now says "synced" across the top of the screen on the first try, just like my AuraHD did.

No, all those descriptions of sideloading firmware is because people don't want to wait for the new release or want to avoid using a real Kobo account.

I used it in desperation.

I'm totally happy using a KOBO account if I could just get it to work reliably. I originally owned a SONY daily edition, but when SONY sold the store to KOBO, I had no choice but to use KOBO for the book downloads. I only agreed to use KOBO *because* they supposedly allowed you to use the reader stand alone like Sony used to.

You really need to look at the site. Next time you are the, go your library. That's done by clicking on your name and choosing "My Library". All the books you have bought will be listed. Most will have a download button. If the book is DRM free, you can download it directly.

OK. I will -- although it's strange that the last time I did get a kobo rep, and asked about it last year some time -- that they wouldn't tell me how to do it, and said I had to get the kobo desktop for windows. That's what started all this, for their desktop wouldn't run even under wine. And then when I got virtualbox running, and Windows 98SE, then I installed my upgrade to windows XP, I found out the very next day that KOBO had 'just' decided to stop supporting windows XP. So -- it's like chasing a moving target.

You are right, Kobo do not support Linux. And it is a pity as I would be surprised if porting the desktop application to Linux would be hard. But, with the number of linux distros out there, supporting them all would be a pain.

It's trivial to support linux even without the desktop, proper; KOBO already has software that runs on linux, eg: on an arm processor, eg: the KOBO itself -- and virtualbox can emulate an arm processor and an SD rom memory pretty easily; all KOBO really would need to do is make a rom image for use with Linux virtualbox, eg: with a normal mouse driver emulating the touch screen of one of the KOBO devices, and they're done.

When I get the KOBO recompiled, I can probably even do it myself with the normal KOBO AuraHD software even without their help.

( I already know how KOBO's /dev/input/eventXX work, so it's trivial to make a driver that emulated the touch screen. )

But, you don't need the Kobo desktop application. As I said above, you can download the DRM free books directly. For DRM protected you need ADE. Unfortunately, Adobe doesn't support Linux (NOT Kobo's fault). But, the older versions of ADE will run in Wine, or at least I have seen reports it does. I am not sure if you need ADE 1.7 or 2.0, but either will work to download the books.

And of course, there is a very simple solution: Don't buy books from Kobo. If you can't work out how to get them onto the device, buy from somewhere else that does let you download the books and sideload them.

Yeah, I'll try it when I get the chance. Thanks.