Hello everybody!
I would like to introduce KoboPatchFan, a GUI application for Kobo patches written in PyQt6 for Windows and Linux.
(New in v1.4: Ability to apply older patch versions to newer firmware)
With KoboPatchFan, you can download, configure and generate Kobo patch files fully automatically. The aim is to significantly reduce the hurdle of patching a Kobo: No more complicated selecting and downloading and unpacking of the right files, no more manually editing the files in a texteditor, no more manually executing a .bat or .sh file. KoboPatchFan can do of all these steps for you.
I wrote the tool because I noticed that the relatively complicated process kept me from patching. Now I want to share it with you.
I took advantage of the brilliant infrastructure of the Kobopatch system. I have briefly described what the tool does on the
Github page, where you can also find the source code. The usage of KoboPatchFan is (hopefully) self-explanatory, but here is a short introduction with screenshots:
- In the tab (1) Download, after selecting your Kobo and the firmware, the tool will automatically check if there is a patch for the selected firmware available. If so, the required files can be downloaded automatically by clicking ‚Start‘. There is an important option to update the underlying "database" files (the first time you start, you will be greeted with a red message indicating that an update is required). This way KoboPatchFan will always be up to date (hopefully).
- In the tab (2) Select patches you select the options that you want to patch. Simply select or deselect the checkboxes. There is also a search mask for filtering. And there is an „Open Edit Mode“ for directly editing the corresponding patch code of the respective option:
- At the end, switch to the tab (3) Generate patch. Click on Run to generate a RootKobo.tgz file. Connect your Kobo, copy the RootKobo.tgz file into the .kobo folder of your Kobo using the Export-File button - and you're done!
- (New in v1.1.0): Enable, disable or delete backup patches (patches to be kept across Kobo/Patch versions) in the tab Backup patches:
- In the Settings tab, you can see the working directory (this is the user's Documents directory, in which a folder "KoboPatchFan" with all the files is created). You can also see the log report there if an error occurs or if you want to have a manual download link.
Changelog:
- 1.4.0 (released 05/31/2025)
- 1.3.1 (released 05/03/2024)
- 1.2.2 (released 09/24/2023)
- 1.2.1 (released 06/30/2023)
- 1.2.0 (released 06/30/2023)
- 1.1.0 (released 04/11/2023)
Spoiler:
In version 1.1.0, it is now possible to
keep the selected patches across Kobo/patch versions. When a new patch version is downloaded, you no longer need to reselect all the patches, but simply use the ones you have previously saved (I call them "backup patches").
This works via the kobopatch.yaml file included with each patch.
- Backup patches in the "(2) Select patches" tab by clicking the "Backup selection" button. This will write the selected patches to a secure kobopatch.yaml file under ./kobopatch_save. Note that you have to do this for each file/tab (nickel, libnickel, librmsdk, libadobe).
- Activate, deactivate or delete the backup patches in a new tab called "Backup-Patches".
- In the tab "(3) Generate patch", a checkbox called "Use Backup-Patches" must be set if the backup patches are to be used.
(So if you already have your own kobopatch.yaml configuration, you need to copy it to ./KoboPatchFan/kobopatch_save/kobopatch.yaml, NOT to the root directory of the KoboPatchFan working folder. You can see the exact location (path) in the Backup-Patches tab.)
- 1.0.1 (released 04/02/2023)
If something doesn't work, you can post it here or on GitHub. Enjoy!
Source (GitHub):
https://github.com/folkemat/KoboPatchFan