GUI-less usage of calibre (especially rss-download)

[lena_punkt]

Hey there,
I wonder if it is possible to use calibres rss-download-feature without the gui via some shell-scripts.

The reason: I own a small plug-pc (like sheevaplug) without graphics card, but it has some usb ports. It is primarily a file server (linux), but I'd like to also use it for downloading RSS news and converting it to epub. I want to plug the reader into the server in the morning for some minutes so that I am able to read the news in the train without the need to switch my PC on. Copying the files and starting some scripts is no problem, but I don't have an X server running ;D.

Greetings,
Lena

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by lena_punkt

I wonder if it is possible to use calibres rss-download-feature without the gui via some shell-scripts.

Yes, but you need Calibre installed. A cron job running:

ebook-convert title.recipe output.epub

will do it.

The reason: I own a small plug-pc (like sheevaplug) without

There are several threads on this, including one on a headless sheevaplug. Searching for "sheevaplug" should find it. I vaguely recall one user having some difficulty, but eventually succeeding.

[lena_punkt]

Wow, thank you . I knew how to convert to epub on the console, but not that downloading rss is that easy, too!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by lena_punkt

Wow, thank you . I knew how to convert to epub on the console, but not that downloading rss is that easy, too!

You're welcome. It is amazingly easy, isn't it!

[lena_punkt]

Okay, I first thought it would really be simple, but it isn't: At least with Gentoo, calibre wants X and Qt4 to be installed, but I do not have any reason for having X and Qt4 installed (not even space for it).

Is it possible to get rss-download-functionality without installing X or Qt4? Does anybody have calibre installed without X? If so, I would try to tune the ebuilds (Gentoos installation scripts) to force install without X, but it means half a day of work I suppose (because i'm not familiar with the scripts), so I don't want to try it without knowing it could work...

EDIT: Trying to install calibre says 350MiBytes of downloads, where 80% is X and Qt4.

[chaley]

My understanding is that calibre requires Qt, and Qt requires X, and so on. If you really don't have space, then you are out of luck.

If you have space, I think that you can use xvfb to solve the problem of having no graphics hardware. I haven't tried it, though.

[lena_punkt]

Yes, thats right. I know I could use xvfb to workaround this, but the point is that I never need X - even for calibre. ebook-convert works fine without X (tried it at my PC), and I can create the recipes with another PC and just copy them to the plugpc.

The reason why I'm using Gentoo is to just install what really is needed. In fact I want to compress the whole system into 256MB of flash at the end (internal flash of Seagate DockStar), and this won't work with X, so it is not an option...

[kovidgoyal]

You shouldn't need X if all you're doing is fetching news.

[lena_punkt]

A closer look offered that it does not install the X server, but many X-libs. Qt is still in the dependency tree. There is no way to avoid it?

[kovidgoyal]

you can't avoid Qt

[lena_punkt]

Okay, now i got it working. Some problems still persist, which is:

Calibre starts several threads to download a recipe. This is very nice if you do not have to worry about RAM because it speeds everything up, but i do have to (only 128MB, slow swap on USB-Flash). It effectively slows down the process enormously (takes about 20 minutes for some daily news). Is it possible to tell calibre not to use so many threads? One would be enough in this case, then RAM would suffice (and speed everything up ).

Thanks,
Lena

EDIT: I found a setting within the desktop version which affects it - but i do not have a GUI on the device. Where can I find the setting, using command-line tools?

[lena_punkt]

Okay, I found it and want to share my solution with others who might have the same problems:

You can set the variable "simultaneous_downloads" within a recipe to 1. Maybe you need to add it. example:

from calibre.web.feeds.news import BasicNewsRecipe

class BasicUserRecipe1257093186(BasicNewsRecipe):
    title          = u'Blogs'
    oldest_article = 14
    language = 'de'
    no_stylesheets = True
    max_articles_per_feed = 100
    remove_tags = [dict(id=['respond', 'ackt', 'nav', 'commentblock',
        'l_sidebar', 'r_sidebar']), dict(attrs={'class':['widgettitle',
            'bt-links', 'navigation']})]

    feeds          = [(u'Hagen - DerWesten', u'http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/hagen/rss'), (u'Tagesschau', u'http://www.tagesschau.de/xml/rss2')]
    multithreaded_fetch = False
    simultaneous_downloads = 1

It did not help that much with the RAM problem, but seems a bit faster on my machine.

[tinti]

maybe you could also share your final solution for having calibre running on your sheevaplug.
I would also like to have calibre running on my sheevaplug, but am stuck at compiling qt on that device

[lena_punkt]

Hum, I would not call it a very good solution. It was not possible to run calibre without Qt, so I compiled it with Qt. My initial problem was flash usage: I wanted to install everything on a small USB Stick. Since I do not own a Sheevaplug (but a Seagate DockStar, which is in fact a docking station for Harddisks) i chose to buy a Seagate harddisk and install the system on that drive.

Since it would take some time (probably several days or because of low RAM [128MB] even weeks) to compile Qt on the device itself, I chose to use distcc (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml) and effectively compile it on my desktop machine.

[usuario74]

I just did a search for Sheevaplug and only could find one thread where it was mentioned but no practical or detailed information as how to do it!
Anyone knows howto achive running calibre on a Sheevaplug without GUI here?
Maybe I should search for running CLI Calibre on linux.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Starson17

There are several threads on this, including one on a headless sheevaplug. Searching for "sheevaplug" should find it. I vaguely recall one user having some difficulty, but eventually succeeding.