Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovejedd
Portable VirtualBox. After I gave away my laptop. I just made an XP virtual machine for handling Microsoft Reader, Adobe Digital Editions and Amazon Kindle. The virtual disk image gets backed up once a month while the books are un-DRM'ed and backed up directly after purchase/download.  |
I found it tricky to get XP to work in a portable environment, because of XP's draconian activation requirements. You would think that you could transfer an XP license from an old XP PC that you are no longer using to a Virtual Box virtual machine, but Microsoft doesn't support this. Even if you get XP properly 'activated', it may not work when you move the portable VM to another machine, because Virtual Box doesn't have an option to lock the CPU ID info to some simple type like a Pentium 4, but instead stupidly insists on passing the real CPU info through to the VM, which could trigger the hardware change detection built into XP when you try to use the VM on another machine with a different CPU type, and potentially deactivate your copy of XP.
I guess most folks get around this by either using a pirated VLK version of the MS XP install CD (because the VLK or Volume License Key versions of XP are less stringent about activation), or by hacking the standard version to disable the activation checks, but this is not something for the faint of heart, or anyone that doesn't like to deal with geeky software.
Another solution is to use a Portable Ubuntu install on a USB thumb drive.
This should be a picnic because Linux installs easily, has no stupid activation checks, and runs well on most hardware, but this is also quickly turns into a geeky nightmare, because there is no native version of Adobe ADE or the Sony Reader Library for Ubuntu.
I was able to get ADE working under Wine in Ubuntu by doing the following -
- Install Wine
- Install the MS Windows version of Adobe Acrobat under Wine in Ubuntu
- Install the MS Windows version of Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) under Wine
- Go through the standard registration for ADE on the Adobe website
After doing this ADE would run and I found that I could download DRM protected titles, but ADE did not recognize my PRS-650 so I could not use it to transfer titles to my reader.
I found that there are at least three ways to get around this -
- Tinker with the
Wine settings using winecfg
- Find the downloaded books in the "~/Documents/My Digital Editions" folder and move them to the PRS-650 using drag and drop (direct drag and drop only works for DRM titles if your Sony has already been activated and registered)
- Load Calibre and under 'Add Books' surf to the 'My Digital Editions' folder and load them into Calibre, then use 'Send to Device' to send them to the Sony. (also only works after the Sony Reader has been registered in ADE)
Even if you don't strip the DRM, Calibre can still manage and transfer books to your Sony for you, it just can open them for viewing locally (use ADE for that), and you will have to find some way to get your Sony registered to your ADE account first for this to work.
If you do want to strip DRM, please note that ALL the 'Apprentice Alf' scripts and Calibre Pluggins will work under Linux, though for the first step of extracting your local ADE Key, you may have to install the Win32 versions of Python and PyCrypto under Wine.
To do this, after ADE is registered under Wine, you will need to load the Win32 versions of Python and PyCrypto libraries into Wine, then run the Python key extraction script from a 'wineconsole cmd' virtual C:\> prompt (this is easier if you copy the ineptkey script right into the wine C:\Python26 folder, then CD to that folder to run the script).
I'm sorry that both the XP under Virtual Box, and Ubuntu USB solutions, are such a pain to configure, because once you get all this configured, either solution will work really well.