Calibre and OpenInkpot

[BobC]

Calibre never ceases to surprise me, however I'm now trying to discover if it is possible to manage the books on a Hanlin V3ext (AKA BeBook 1) which is using the "OpenInkpot" software using Calibre.

This is not a matter of handling books stored on an external SD card that can be plugged into the BeBook but connecting Calibre to the device itself. I have the Bebook connected using the USB/Ethernet connection and can access the storage using WinSCP which uses SSH to connect.

I can't see an "OpenInpot" named device interface plugin but it's possible one of the obscure devices uses the same connection method.

BobC

[theducks]

Hanlin V3 are supported by USB
and indirectly by connect to Folder (SD card plugged into PC)

My V5 (Astak) USB connector has cracked traces and is only good for charging. I use the Folder Device to load the SD Card

[BobC]

I am aware of that method of connection, however once you have loaded Openinkpot onto the Hanlin hardware everything changes and the device is not exposed as a USB mass storage device. My other BeBook works fine that way but the OI one is the one I was working on.

As I explained the OI firmware uses the USB port as an Ethernet interface so with Windows when you plug it in you get a second "Network Interface" and have to connect to a specific IP address and log into the device using SSH. So rather than treating the Hanlin as a simple storage device you are connecting to a Linux box much as you would over a LAN. It's actually quite instructive as you can see the entire Linux filesystem on the Ebook, not just the storage used for books etc, but the programs and config files as well.

BobC

[eschwartz]

calibre only supports two connection methods.

USBMS identified via vendor ids.
wireless plugin via a specially written client program. Written to order and maintained by @chaley for his Android app "Calibre Companion", though KOReader now uses the same infrastructure as well.

If you are connecting to your computer via sshfs you will have to use the Connect to folder method -- no two ways about it.

...

Personally, I think maybe the OpenInkpot people should've considered supporting USBMS.
There is no trick to supporting sshfs, I do it on my Kindle with USBNetwork for ssh support...

[BobC]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

calibre only supports two connection methods.

USBMS identified via vendor ids.
<snip>

If you are connecting to your computer via sshfs you will have to use the Connect to folder method -- no two ways about it.

That is most helpful - your reference to sshfs gives me an avenue to pursue - if I can mount the device as a drive on the Win 8 machine I'll be able to work with that. I hadn't heard of sshfs before but a quick Google and this website looks particularly useful : http://igikorn.com/sshfs-windows-8/

Openinkpot is now dead as an ongoing project so I have to work with what is there; I guess as a "development" project the connection approach they took was a pragmatic one as it gave full access to the system and would allow the devs to tinker easily.

BobC

[eschwartz]

Ah, not so much.
sshfs is the generic linux way of accessing another device's filesystem as though it were part of the computer's filesystem.

calibre's "Connect to folder" has no hard dependency on sshfs -- you should be able to use it with any folder that appears in your File Explorer.

It certainly won't allow you to use one of the auto-mount-detected device drivers.

[BobC]

Well I seem to have come to a dead end on this - it appears that OI uses SCP when connecting to the WinSCP client I can use to access the file system.

There are a few bits of software that will allow the mapping of remote drives using SFTP and other protocols but none I can find that use SCP. I've tried various options but they all refuse to connect to the OI filesystem.

From what I've discovered OI uses Dropbear as a SSH Server and must have SCP support included when OI was built. That means that I would need Windows software that implements drive mapping using SCP, and to date this is rarer than hen's teeth.

I have no problems manually getting the files onto the internal storage using WinSCP; it's just that I was hoping to be able to manage what went where using Calibre and various tags. I will need to set up a "mirror" of the OI File-system on the Win 8 machine and connect to that with Calibre and then use WinSCP to synchronise those folders with the Hanlin; messy but doable.

BobC

[eschwartz]

Yeah, maybe easy for the developers but not so easy or the users if you can't use the darn stinking file browser.

Maybe you can install OpenSSH on the OI device, since dropbear only supports SCP and you *need* sftp-server or a drop-in replacement with the same functionality to implement SSHFS or Windows equivalents.
Then you could at least use Connect-to-folder.