Help with Calibre Portable and Linux

[bambuko]

Thanks, will try it tonight.
In the meantime I had another brain fart - it goes like this:
We already have self-contained Calibre on the usb stick, why not have self-contained light linux distro to run the whole show, without even getting anywhere near the original OS on the machine one is using?
This should protect the world from the threat presented by my madness, because the whole thing is now totally self-contained.

Providing your machine is capable of booting from usb-hdd.

[eschwartz]

Do you have an extra ~15 GB to spare on your USB drive? OS-on-a-stick.

Most LiveUSBs use a squashfs for the filesystem. You'd have to store the data somewhere else -- some have mechanisms for storing persistent data, but it would be... awkward. You could do it though.

I wouldn't worry about the "threat".

[bambuko]

I am fine with a "threat", but it is an interesting thought.
I have 65Gb stick for this experiment (they are getting very cheap).
My preferred lightweight distro would probably do live install in less than 1Gb (and it runs as root all the time )
I've done it with PCLinuxOS as live usb stick and it runs perfectly fine

Back to your script - I declare it's proper dog's cojones

It now just runs (regardless whether root or user) and no error messages of any kind.

[eschwartz]

65GB is enough to install Windows-on-a-stick, if it comes to that.
Note: That threat, I would worry about.

Use it for a few days, and assuming nothing else comes up I will get it committed.

[bambuko]

More testing...
Some of my machines haven't got Qt5, so I have both the latest version of Calibre and 1.48.0 available on the stick:



inside, both calibre_qt4 and calibre_qt5 are similar (the only difference is the version of calibre in calibre folder):



Both symlink to the same library on the stick.

All works fine for both and I am very happy. apart from some messages when closing older version:

CONFIG FILES:       /mnt/sdb1/calibre_qt4/CalibreConfig
--------------------------------------------------
LIBRARY FILES:      /mnt/sdb1/calibre_qt4/CalibreLibrary
--------------------------------------------------
SOURCE FILES:       *** Not being Used ***
--------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM FILES:      /mnt/sdb1/calibre_qt4/calibre
--------------------------------------------------
TEMPORARY FILES:    /tmp/CALIBRE_TEMP_QBDMipU
--------------------------------------------------

Press CTRL-C if you do not want to continue
Press ENTER to continue and start Calibre

Starting up Calibre from portable directory "/mnt/sdb1/calibre_qt4"
Using library at /mnt/sdb1/calibre_qt4/CalibreLibrary
chmod: cannot access ‘/mnt/sdb1/calibre_qt4/CalibreMetadata’: No such file or directory
chmod: cannot access ‘/mnt/sdb1/calibre_qt4/CalibreSource/src’: No such file or directory
Script completed hit RETURN to close window.

[eschwartz]

Those folders don't exist, I suppose I could squelch the warnings...

And I don't see why you need the old version. Qt is contained within the binaries, assuming you are using portable copies of them.

EDIT: Warnings squelched.

[bambuko]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

... I don't see why you need the old version. Qt is contained within the binaries, assuming you are using portable copies of them...

That was something that was confusing to me - perhaps I got it all wrong?

I am using "..."isolated" install that only touches files inside the installation directory and does not need to be run as root, like this..."

wget -nv -O- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/master/setup/linux-installer.py | python -c "import sys; main=lambda x,y:sys.stderr.write('Download failed\n'); exec(sys.stdin.read()); main('~/calibre-bin', True)"

and it kept crashing when I used it on machine with light Linux distro (which didn't have Qt5).
Problem only got solved when I went back to 1.48

[eschwartz]

No, Qt5 is inside that install -- doesn't matter where you put it, it's still the same program executables, and if it was downloaded from calibre-ebook.com it uses its own Qt5.

If it is a distro install, it uses the system Qt5 -- or there is no distro calibre 2.

If it is crashing, the problem most likely has to do with your version of glibc -- that is the only thing the calibre binaries have a dependency on. (This is mentioned in the notes on the download page.)
Earlier versions of calibre could make do with earlier glibc versions.



Doesn't really matter what specifically made it fail though.