Thread: Hello from a Palm user with problems
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Old 11-10-2010, 02:21 PM   #4
DMcCunney
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Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by demyhr View Post
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.

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