Getting Calibre to see Fire on Fedora Linux (KDE)

[vepxistqaosani]

The Calibre manual says

Note that on macOS and Linux only a single program can connect to an Android device at a time, so make sure the device is not opened in the OS File manager, or the Android File Transfer utility, etc.

Unfortunately, this is a bit difficult to do, at least under KDE, where Dolphin will not easily relinquish its control over MTP devices. So I thought I'd share the solution I found.

I found a clue here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=263186

What worked for me is

kill kiod5

So I did

ps aux | grep kiod5

to get the process number, and then

kill -9 <process number>

Then I reattached the Fire to the USB port and restarted Calibre.

Everything works -- and, since I rarely use a graphical file manager, it has had no effect on my other work.

Your mileage may vary.