Hello from a Palm user with problems

[demyhr]

Hello all, I wish I could start this with positive experiences with Calibre but I'm having numerous problems installing and using it on my HP ZD7058CL Pavillion laptop. Several attempts to install hung up on disk space check (250GB with over a 100GB avail). Downloaded the latest version .7.2.7 using QT library and got a I think successful install. However as yet I have not been able to convert an .epub file to a .mobi or .prc file. No error messages, just hangs at the conversion setup/properties page. Additionally, operation seems very slow, i.e. hav to wait 30 seconds or so to add files (so far the only operation the I have had success with.

As a sanity check I installed Calibre on my desktop and what little I have tried has been successful so I know the software works. I will do more experimenting on the desktop to get familiar with the program.

As a new Calibre user but fairly experienced computer user I would appreciate any help available.

Thanks

David

[GeoffC]

Welcome to mobileread ....

I'll see if we can relocate this question to the Calibre forum .... good luck

[Manichean]

When you say "0.7.27 with Qt library" do you mean the version linked to in this thread? That's a beta version and may (or may not ) have multiple issues. Also, is your computer reasonably powerful? What version of Windows (I'm assuming you're running windows since you mentioned the disk space check taking a lot of time, which is a known issue) are you running?
The disk space check on install takes quite a bit of time, I've had instances of it running without updating the screen for several minutes. Search the forum if you're interested in the reasons. The slow calibre response might, if you have a somewhat older computer, be entirely normal, although it sounds a bit excessive. If you downloaded the normal version (from here), I'd suggest waiting for the next release, due out sometime at the end of the week, I believe, which should bring a quite noticeable speedup due to a new version of the Qt library. If you already downloaded the beta version from the thread I linked to above, try asking inside that thread for help or wait until the version is officially released.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by demyhr

Hello all, I wish I could start this with positive experiences with Calibre but I'm having numerous problems installing and using it on my HP ZD7058CL Pavillion laptop. Several attempts to install hung up on disk space check (250GB with over a 100GB avail). Downloaded the latest version .7.2.7 using QT library and got a I think successful install. However as yet I have not been able to convert an .epub file to a .mobi or .prc file. No error messages, just hangs at the conversion setup/properties page. Additionally, operation seems very slow, i.e. hav to wait 30 seconds or so to add files (so far the only operation the I have had success with.

I looked at the specs for your laptop, and it looks powerful enough. I run Calibre here on an XP SP3 desktop with a 1.8ghz CPU and 3GB of RAM. It's not a speed demon, but does work.

Installation is slow. I just upgraded to the 7.2.7 release here, and an install from a standing start took about 8 minutes. This is not a surprise: Calibre is written in the cross-platform Python script language (which allows it to be available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X, because versions of Python exist for them), so the install must install the Python runtimes and other components like the Qt libraries, as well as various plugins offered with it.

I have successfully converted ePub files to Mobi format here, to be able to read them using the Mobi viewer on my PalmOS device. This is a fall-back position - by preference, I get content in HTML, and convert on the desktop for the open source Plucker offline HTML viewer for Palm OS. The Plucker desktop is also cross platform and written in Python. And Plucker allows me to use Zlib compression on the resulting documents, resulting in smaller ebook files.

Calibre has a few annoyances. It wants to be my master ebook tool and maintainer of my ebook library, which is not what I want to use it for. So before I can convert an ebook, I must add it to Calibre's library, which can be a time consuming process. (And space consuming - my ebooks directory occupies about 18.3GB, including source files, conversions, and other things for about 4,000 ebook volumes. Calibre wants to add any ebooks it manages to it's own hierarchy. I don't want to think about how long it would take or what the resulting space requirements would be if I told Calibre to index it.

It doesn't matter whether you produce a .mobi or a .prc file - the file format is identical. If you get a mobi file, rename it to prc extension before adding it to your Palm device.

You might post the exact steps you took to attempt to do the ePub->Mobi conversion. It's possible you missed something. And in any case, patience is recommended. Calibre is good, but it's not fast.

David

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Dennis

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Calibre has a few annoyances. It wants to be my master ebook tool and maintainer of my ebook library, which is not what I want to use it for.

You can run Calibre without the GUI and never add any books to its database. It's written to allow almost all functions to run from command line. This includes book format conversion.

So before I can convert an ebook, I must add it to Calibre's library, which can be a time consuming process. (And space consuming - my ebooks directory occupies about 18.3GB, including source files, conversions, and other things for about 4,000 ebook volumes. Calibre wants to add any ebooks it manages to it's own hierarchy. I don't want to think about how long it would take or what the resulting space requirements would be if I told Calibre to index it.

No, you are not required to add books to Calibre before converting them, nor do you have to let Calibre manage them. Personally, I can't live without the management and search functions, but it's certainly possible to run conversion from the command line.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Starson17

You can run Calibre without the GUI and never add any books to its database. It's written to allow almost all functions to run from command line. This includes book format conversion.

Thank you. I'm an old command line user, on Unix/Linux and elsewhere, but make only occasional use of Calibre and hadn't explored the command line options. Noted for future reference.

I was going strictly on what the GUI requires. It might be nice if it didn't require that, but with the command line options that's not a pressing problem.

No, you are not required to add books to Calibre before converting them, nor do you have to let Calibre manage them. Personally, I can't live without the management and search functions, but it's certainly possible to run conversion from the command line.

I can live without the management and search functions. My ebooks directory is arranged to handle categorization, and author names in a last name, first name format are part of my naming convention, so finding particular things is fairly simple. In addition, Google Desktop is installed, so I can locate things by snippets of content (most of my material starts with HTML source), and Locate32 handles searches by file names. Calibre here is used for occasional format conversions and creating/editing metadata for supported formats.

But this is good to know. Thanks again.
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Dennis

[demyhr]

I thank everyone for their responses. First, the hardware I am using is an HP Pavillion laptop with 2Gb Ram and a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4. I guess that could be considered old at this point. The other system is a desktop with an Intel MB, 1GB ram and 2.4GHz Pentium 4. Calibre installs and runs adequately on the desk top. I have been able to install Calibre on the laptop but as I said, other than adding a file any attempts to run the conversion operation seemingly locks up the system. I have waited up to 30 minutes with no response. I have tried versions from 6.x.x to 7.27/Qt with basically the same results. I imagine my laptop has some conflicting program running. I will give it a try in safe mode or without loading startup stuff and see if I can isolate the problem. If there are any known conflicts anyone knows about share the info with me.

In the mean time using my desktop machine is my only recourse.

As for searching the disk or running a disk check, this seems an unnecessary these days. Many of these e-reader and other programs do these searches for compatible files and on todays 500GB+ drive can take forever. Most users such as myself would prefer to point the software to the appropriate directories rather than waiting for the software to search the disk.

David

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by demyhr

I thank everyone for their responses. First, the hardware I am using is an HP Pavillion laptop with 2Gb Ram and a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4. I guess that could be considered old at this point. The other system is a desktop with an Intel MB, 1GB ram and 2.4GHz Pentium 4. Calibre installs and runs adequately on the desk top. I have been able to install Calibre on the laptop but as I said, other than adding a file any attempts to run the conversion operation seemingly locks up the system. I have waited up to 30 minutes with no response. I have tried versions from 6.x.x to 7.27/Qt with basically the same results. I imagine my laptop has some conflicting program running. I will give it a try in safe mode or without loading startup stuff and see if I can isolate the problem. If there are any known conflicts anyone knows about share the info with me.

Go to Start/Settings, select Control Panel, and in Control Panel, click on Admin tools. Select Event Viewer. Look under the System and Application sections. There may be messages there that will give clues to what is going wrong. Look at entries with a white X in a red circle (Errors) and black exclamation point in a yellow triangle (Warnings).

In the mean time using my desktop machine is my only recourse.

Yes.

As for searching the disk or running a disk check, this seems an unnecessary these days. Many of these e-reader and other programs do these searches for compatible files and on todays 500GB+ drive can take forever. Most users such as myself would prefer to point the software to the appropriate directories rather than waiting for the software to search the disk.

Calibre can be told what directories to look at. It does not need to search the entire drive. So can the reader apps I'm aware of.

I have five physical drives in my desktop. One tool I like for keeping track is Locate32, an open source Windows port of the Linux Locate utility. Locate searches your drive(s) and produces a database of all files on your system and where they are located. You can have a database that indexes the entire system, or databases that index specified parts, and can select which to use when doing a search. Get it here: http://www.locate32.net/

David

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Dennis

[demyhr]

I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but the problem has been isolated and solved to whit: I use a Wacom tablet and for some reason certain mouse clicks are not recognized. Using the Wacom and clicking on the OK button of the convert window apparently is not recognized by Calibre even though the button is highlighted. Since retiring I no longer use the Table Pen feature so I removed the tablet and installed a normal mouse Calibre works as it does on my desktop. I wish I could say isolating the problem was a magnificent feat of debugging I can't. While disabling software in hopes of finding the problem during one of my many boot cycles I disabled the Wacom. Moving around was very slow so I started using the mousepad on the laptop. Lo Calibre worked as it should. Consider the problem solved.

Thanks for all the responses.

David

[demyhr]

I would like to expand on the Calibre/Wacom issue. It appears the issue occurs only with the left mouse button on the mouse or pen when used in the mouse mode (relative positioning). I have had problems with the Wacom tablet using Gimp in the past. I submitted a bug report to bugzilla a couple years ago and occasionally get e-mails that others continue to have problems. The claim is that the problem is in the GTK software package. In any event my problem is easily solved by setting the Wacom to pen mode or assigning LeftClick to one of the programmable buttons or using the laptop keypad buttons.

David