[frostschutz]

It's possible that it won't work with a USB cable connected. Maybe you could strace to find out how nickel detects this and then do something about it. I telnet through wifi. But still it's only half a solution since you have to confirm on the touchscreen. Although that could have its advantages.

Another way is to emulate ext. SD but your books have to be on ext. SD (real or emulated) for that. This does not exist for /mnt/onboard since that card can't be taken out (and the int. cardreader has no media change detection, for my magic memory upgrade mod which changes internal media I had to cheat, but no way nickel would handle).

Maybe you can convince nickel to run the database upgrade code path with a ld library preload script somehow, what the nightmode does; if there is a better way to trigger this from the outside, I don't know of it.

> it says 'library empty', and all my normal books are gone.

Connecting to PC must umount the filesystems on the Kobo; if you're using telnet and you have anything running still working off the mounted fs, you might see filesystem corruption due to failed umounts and such.