Calibre installation on Ubuntu behind proxy

[hoodakaushal]

I'm in a college, and we have to use proxy for internet access.
I was trying to install Calibre using the wget command (as given at http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux), but I get an error
socket.error: [Erno 111] Connection Refused.

I'm able to use apt-get however, so it is not a network issue.

Suggestions?

[kovidgoyal]

Setup the proper proxy for wget using the http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables. Or download the tarball manually as is described in the download linux page for installing previous releases.

[hoodakaushal]

Thanks.

[kindle2owner]

Like the OP, I am unable use the generic method (wget) to install Calibre on my Ubuntu 14.04 system due to being behind a proxy server. I've also tried the no-check-certificate method with wget without success.

What I ended up doing was installing Calibre via the repository ("sudo apt-get install calibre") but this version is kind of old. So I figured I'd download the tarball of 2.0 and overwrite the 1.25 version I currently have using the method called out on the download page:

sudo rm -rf /opt/calibre/* && sudo tar xvf /path/to/downloaded/calibre-tarball.txz -C /opt/calibre

Doesn't work though. Firstly, the repository doesn't install to /opt/calibre. So I did a whereis to find it and found two possible directories:

$ whereis calibre
calibre: /usr/bin/calibre /usr/lib/calibre /usr/bin/X11/calibre /usr/share/calibre /usr/share/man/man1/calibre.1.gz

I tried:

sudo rm -rf /usr/share/calibre/* && sudo tar xvf /home/tiffty/calibre-2.0.0-i686.txz -C /usr/share/calibre

and later after reinstalling calibre using apt-get

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/calibre/* && sudo tar xvf /home/tiffty/calibre-2.0.0-i686.txz -C /usr/lib/calibre

but in both instances Calibre doesn't start up anymore.

Does the "copy over" technique not work when going from 1.x to 2.0?

[kovidgoyal]

Uninstall the repository calibre.

Download the tarball

Then run

sudo mkdir -p /opt/calibre
sudo rm -rf /opt/calibre/* && sudo tar xvf /path/to/downloaded/calibre-tarball.txz -C /opt/calibre
sudo /opt/calibre/calibre_postinstall

That's it, calibre is installed.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by kindle2owner

Like the OP, I am unable use the generic method (wget) to install Calibre on my Ubuntu 14.04 system due to being behind a proxy server. I've also tried the no-check-certificate method with wget without success.

What I ended up doing was installing Calibre via the repository ("sudo apt-get install calibre") but this version is kind of old. So I figured I'd download the tarball of 2.0 and overwrite the 1.25 version I currently have using the method called out on the download page:

sudo rm -rf /opt/calibre/* && sudo tar xvf /path/to/downloaded/calibre-tarball.txz -C /opt/calibre

Doesn't work though. Firstly, the repository doesn't install to /opt/calibre. So I did a whereis to find it and found two possible directories:

$ whereis calibre
calibre: /usr/bin/calibre /usr/lib/calibre /usr/bin/X11/calibre /usr/share/calibre /usr/share/man/man1/calibre.1.gz

I tried:

sudo rm -rf /usr/share/calibre/* && sudo tar xvf /home/tiffty/calibre-2.0.0-i686.txz -C /usr/share/calibre

and later after reinstalling calibre using apt-get

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/calibre/* && sudo tar xvf /home/tiffty/calibre-2.0.0-i686.txz -C /usr/lib/calibre

but in both instances Calibre doesn't start up anymore.

Does the "copy over" technique not work when going from 1.x to 2.0?

You had two copies of calibre installed, one the repo version and one the self-contained binary. The binary version uses a binary wrapper to launch, the repo uses a python script which imports calibre from /usr/lib/calibre/ (containing the source code) via site-packages, and runs main()

In other words, the two are mutually exclusive in every respect and deleting stuff from the distro calibre will break the distro calibre, even if you replace it with binaries. And /usr/bin/calibre can only launch one of them, but you never set it to launch the binary calibre. That is what running /opt/calibre/calibre_postinstall does (usually as part of the generic installer).