Error communicating with device

[Soul_Est]

I had added a couple new books to my Calibre library earlier today (dry, reference textbooks ) and edited their metadata. The computer's Arch Linux installation has been updated to the latest packages available from the official repositories. After connecting my PRS-650 to my computer and Calibre tries to access it, I received this error message:

calibre, version 0.8.68
ERROR: Error: Error communicating with device

'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\uf025' in position 83: ordinal not in range(128)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/device.py", line 84, in run
    self.result = self.func(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/device.py", line 437, in _books
    mainlist = self.device.books(oncard=None, end_session=False)
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/devices/prs505/driver.py", line 199, in books
    bl = USBMS.books(self, oncard=oncard, end_session=end_session)
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/devices/usbms/driver.py", line 212, in books
    for path, dirs, files in os.walk(ebook_dir):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/os.py", line 294, in walk
    for x in walk(new_path, topdown, onerror, followlinks):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/os.py", line 294, in walk
    for x in walk(new_path, topdown, onerror, followlinks):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/os.py", line 294, in walk
    for x in walk(new_path, topdown, onerror, followlinks):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/os.py", line 294, in walk
    for x in walk(new_path, topdown, onerror, followlinks):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/os.py", line 284, in walk
    if isdir(join(top, name)):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/genericpath.py", line 41, in isdir
    st = os.stat(s)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\uf025' in position 83: ordinal not in range(128)

While knowing where the error is occurring in the file is great but unfortunately I'm no Python programmer. I do well enough in C and Ruby though.
Any ideas on what the issue may be?

[kovidgoyal]

First, dont use the arch package, use the official calibre binary. Then fix your arch install to have a UTF-8 based locale. Then fix whatever file is causing that error to have its filename encoded in utf-8.

[Soul_Est]

Thanks for the advice. Calibre works correctly now. Installed it using this command:

sudo python2 -c "import sys; py = sys.version_info[0] > 2; u = __import__('urllib.request' if py else 'urllib', fromlist=1); exec(u.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read()); main(install_dir='/opt')"