XHTML to MOBI: "mportError: cannot import name QColor"

[rlpowell]

Basic example of the problem is below. Conversion to epub works fine, but mobi fails. I've tried everything I can find about this online:

rlpowell@vrici> ebook-convert /home/rlpowell/lojban/cll/build/xhtml_nochunks.zip /home/rlpowell/lojban/cll/build/cll.epub 2>&1 | tail -n 20
        Detected chapter: 1. The Hills Are Alive With The Sounds Of Lojban
        Detected chapter: Chapter*1.*The Hills Are Alive With The Sounds Of
        Detected chapter: Chapter*1.*The Hills Are Alive With The Sounds Of
Maximum TOC links reached, stopping.
Auto generated TOC with 53 entries.
Flattening CSS and remapping font sizes...
Source base font size is 9.00000pt
Removing fake margins...
Cleaning up manifest...
Trimming unused files from manifest...
Creating EPUB Output...
67% Running EPUB Output plugin
Splitting markup on page breaks and flow limits, if any...
        Looking for large trees in index.html...
        No large trees found
        Split into 19 parts
Generating default cover
Failed to generate default cover
EPUB output written to /home/rlpowell/lojban/cll/build/cll.epub
Output saved to   /home/rlpowell/lojban/cll/build/cll.epub




rlpowell@vrici> ebook-convert /home/rlpowell/lojban/cll/build/xhtml_nochunks.zip /home/rlpowell/lojban/cll/build/cll.mobi 2>&1 | tail -n 20
Cleaning up manifest...
Trimming unused files from manifest...
Creating MOBI Output...
67% Running MOBI Output plugin
Serializing resources...
Creating MOBI 6 output
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/bin/ebook-convert", line 20, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/ebooks/conversion/cli.py", line 360, in main
    plumber.run()
  File "/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plumber.py", line 1198, in run
    self.opts, self.log)
  File "/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/mobi_output.py", line 207, in convert
    self.write_mobi(input_plugin, output_path, kf8, resources)
  File "/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/mobi_output.py", line 217, in write_mobi
    from calibre.ebooks.oeb.transforms.rasterize import SVGRasterizer, Unavailable
  File "/usr/lib64/calibre/calibre/ebooks/oeb/transforms/rasterize.py", line 13, in <module>
    from PyQt5.Qt import (
ImportError: cannot import name QColor

The source file is http://vrici.lojban.org/~rlpowell/me...read_forum.zip and the full output is http://vrici.lojban.org/~rlpowell/me...read_forum.out

When I've researched this online, people have talked about various package problems, so here's some package info that may help: http://paste.fedoraproject.org/341266/58169624/ ; that's the output of dnf list installed '*poppl*' '*qt*' '*libc*' '*libstdc*'

Note that ebook-convert is explicitely using python2, so python3 stuff can be ignored.

The libstdc++ version looks scary, but:

rlpowell@vrici> ls -l /lib64/libstdc++.so.6*
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 19 Dec 8 09:45 /lib64/libstdc++.so.6 -> libstdc++.so.6.0.21*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 1566600 Dec 8 09:49 /lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.21*

[kovidgoyal]

Uninstall your distro calibre package and install the official binary from https://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux

[rlpowell]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Uninstall your distro calibre package and install the official binary from https://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux

... That worked. That's terrible.

I'll point this out to the Fedora package maintainer. Thanks.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by rlpowell

... That worked. That's terrible.

I'll point this out to the Fedora package maintainer. Thanks.

They (most distros) Know
They don't care or really think they know better

[eschwartz]

I think it is pretty funny they still ship a dummy calibre-mount-helper.

Also IIRC they are the pushy ones who wanted appdata files in the first place (and bothered app developers to include them in the upstream sources). But they ship their own replacement for calibre's appdata.xml

[rlpowell]

After literally years, figured this out:

There were random old crappy *system-level* libs in /usr/local/lib, and they were *in use*:

rlpowell@vrici> sudo ldd /usr/bin/* | grep /usr/local/lib | awk '{ print $3 }' | sort | uniq -c
[sudo] password for rlpowell:
ldd: /usr/bin/miniterm-2.7.py: No such file or directory
ldd: warning: you do not have execution permission for `/usr/bin/mono-sgen-gdb.py'
2 /usr/local/lib/libQtCore.so.4
1 /usr/local/lib/libQtGui.so.4
82 /usr/local/lib/libfontconfig.so.1
101 /usr/local/lib/libfreetype.so.6
5 /usr/local/lib/libguile-2.0.so.22

Removing that crap plus a re-install cleared the problem right up.

;___; I can't believe it was something so dumb. Sorry about that!