Touch Kobo Touch Firmware 2.0

[dioioib]

I have given my TK a few more hours with version 2.0. and WOW! I love this new OS. It brings back the simplicity of the first versions with the power of shelves. I have to side load small batches of books but a small price to pay for the improvements. Good work Kobo Team. You just won back some word of mouth.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by camtosh

I just tried my first wifi sync on my KT (ver 2.0.0) -- I was also booting up my Macbook laptop at the same time. The KT logged in to the wifi after I typed the wifi password, and proceeded to sync. Then my Mac, which I had powered on after the KT, popped up a message that another device was using the IP address of this Mac. Is that supposed to happen? i.e., is the KT supposed to have its own IP address? perhaps that is why people have trouble, if their IP address is already in use when the KT is trying to log in to the wifi? I am no expert...

My KT did not automatically upgrade the firmware to 2.0.2, which is what I thought would happen. Isn't 2.0.2 the latest firmware level for Japan? How can I get it to upgrade? Do I have to open Kobo Desktop? I did that yesterday, and connected with the USB cable, but it didn't upgrade then either. I am in Japan, so I figured it would upgrade.

The IP address conflict can happen when you bring a device out of sleep/hibernate mode after the IP address has already been re-assigned by the DHCP server. On my wireless router, I set the lease time to 3 days to keep this from happening with my device collection. With the default of 3 hours, when I woke my laptop up after being away during the day, I'd find that it was trying to use the address it had when it entered sleep/hibernate mode while the router had re-assigned the address to another device.

If you want to try the 2.0.2 firmware, you can download it from the links in various message in this thread and install it. You might want to check your 'Device Information' page first though since that seems to be the only place the firmware revision is shown. The readme files seem to be the same between the two 2.0.0 releases and the 2.0.2 release. I did notice a third Kobo file in the root of the internal memory which is a Japanese language version of the Welcome to Kobo but I had to move it to be able to open it, likely since I have English set as the language of choice.

[Matth79]

Originally Posted by camtosh

I just tried my first wifi sync on my KT (ver 2.0.0) -- I was also booting up my Macbook laptop at the same time. The KT logged in to the wifi after I typed the wifi password, and proceeded to sync. Then my Mac, which I had powered on after the KT, popped up a message that another device was using the IP address of this Mac. Is that supposed to happen? i.e., is the KT supposed to have its own IP address? perhaps that is why people have trouble, if their IP address is already in use when the KT is trying to log in to the wifi? I am no expert...

IP address conflicts, an interesting problem... I've found they happen if you are in the habit of turning off the router, lets say it's set to grant 24 hour IP address leases, so device 1 is started and gets the 1st IP in the pool, then device 2 and 3. Since the lease is 24 hours, each device will remember the IP, Windows, for instance, must be saving in the registry, as the lease is preserved across reboots.
Then you turn off the router, and that does NOT store the information, so if a device that is not relying on an unexpired lease is started, IT will get the 1st IP, and then when device 1 is started, it will conflict if the lease has not expired.

So to avoid, set the DHCP lease SHORT in a router that will not remain powered up to retain them, or for all your devices, use the router's fixed DHCP IP mapping to shift them away from the auto-assign pool (eg. mine assigns from 100 - 200, uses .1 itself, so I tend to place "known" devices on 10, 20, 30, 40 etc.). Some call it mapping, binding, DHCP assign.

[cleverly_quirky]

I have my router switched on 24 hours a day, the DHCP lease time is set to 24 hours.

I've never had an IP address conflict with my various devices, including the Kobo Touch e-reader

[camtosh]

Ah, that's why. My dear hubby insists that we power off everything when not in use to save electricity (which is expensive in Japan and esp. since Fukushima melted down) -- so the switches to all the computers, wifi router, fans, TV, etc. get turned off every night. domo!

Thanks for the pointer to the .02 firmware.

[Mrs_Often]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I was about to reply to your previous post saying that it was a bug in 2.0.0 when I saw this.

I have updated a few epubs onto my KT with 2.0.2 on it with no problems. What sort of changes did you make? The changes have been to the metadata (via calibre) or updated versions from the original site with extra chapters.

I have had problems in the past where the structure of the epub changed to much. Adding chapters at the end seems to be OK (but they don't go in the TOC). Removing them or moving them will break things. If this was the first time the epubs were edited the epub in Sigil, Sigil will rewrite the structure moving all the files into sub-directories. The KT would have a problem with this and deleting the file is the probable result. With 1.9.17, a change would cause a problem when you tried to read the epub. It would either cause the KT to reboot, or any navigation based on the TOC in the epub wouldn't work.

Hah very interesting indeed. I cannot remember exactly what changes I made that caused the epub to be deleted from my KT... Bust most likely it was a change in the titlepage.xhtml to make the book cover show properly without margins. I'd have used Sigil... but I can't say if it would have been the first Sigil edit. I do vaguely remember that my first change in the xhtml didn't do the trick and I had to re-do it, causing another delete...

----

I have another strange thing in a sideloaded epub: I usually have my left and right margins rather large, but in this one book, the margins are completely absent, and they do not react to trying to make them larger or narrower from within the book settings on the KT. It's the only book to show this problem so far (though I've only checked about 4). Weird. (I haven't looked inside the book yet, and I don't really want to because I don't want to go through the nonsense of having the book deleted etc.)

(I'm on 2.0.2.)

[Danger]

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

...
I have another strange thing in a sideloaded epub: I usually have my left and right margins rather large, but in this one book, the margins are completely absent, and they do not react to trying to make them larger or narrower from within the book settings on the KT. It's the only book to show this problem so far (though I've only checked about 4). Weird. (I haven't looked inside the book yet, and I don't really want to because I don't want to go through the nonsense of having the book deleted etc.)

(I'm on 2.0.2.)

Margins are probably set to 0 in the epub. Which in itself is strange as most books I have come across have the margins set to 5pt. I prefer 1em - 1.5em myself but now that you can specify margins on the KT I just remove any references in the stylesheet or (x)html pages to right/left margin width.

Changing the margins (or removing them altogether) in the epub does not require a delete and then re-add to the Kobo. If you are editting on you computer you can drag/drop onto the Kobo and the new margins (or lack there of) will be picked up when you open the book.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

Hah very interesting indeed. I cannot remember exactly what changes I made that caused the epub to be deleted from my KT... Bust most likely it was a change in the titlepage.xhtml to make the book cover show properly without margins. I'd have used Sigil... but I can't say if it would have been the first Sigil edit. I do vaguely remember that my first change in the xhtml didn't do the trick and I had to re-do it, causing another delete...

I have done a lot of playing over the last few days, and can't find any real consistency in why epubs get deleted. About the only thing I am sure of is if I change the title of the epub in the metadata.

I have another strange thing in a sideloaded epub: I usually have my left and right margins rather large, but in this one book, the margins are completely absent, and they do not react to trying to make them larger or narrower from within the book settings on the KT. It's the only book to show this problem so far (though I've only checked about 4). Weird. (I haven't looked inside the book yet, and I don't really want to because I don't want to go through the nonsense of having the book deleted etc.)

(I'm on 2.0.2.)

As danger said, that means that the left and right margins are set somewhere. If they are set, the KT respects them and won't override the. I think you should be looking for the @page margins, but it might be one of the others as well. I was thinking that setting them to zero was OK, but maybe they have to be completely removed.

[Danger]

Originally Posted by davidfor

...I was thinking that setting them to zero was OK, but maybe they have to be completely removed.

I did that once by accident. Text was as far left/right as it could get, could not change the margins via the Kobo. Had to go back into the epub and remove the margin style I had put in. I had used my no-margin style, that I normally use for the cover, in a body tag for the first chapter. Not sure how I did that but the Kobo does indeed respect a margin: 0; style (or alternatively margin-left:0; margin-right:0; ).

[Mrs_Often]

Thanks Danger and Davidfor! I did expect to have a margin set to 0 somewhere... But your reassurance that a margin change wouldn't cause delete made me go look. The @Page style doesn't contain any right left margin at all... However the stylesheet.css contains several different ones under different .calibre classes... That really confuses me, why does calibre make so many classes?

But anyway what I think is strange, is that the KT respects left/right margins of 0, but a margin of 5pt is changeable from within the book's settings. What's the point? Weird. (On that note, it's weird in itself that a 0pt left/right margin is respected while -finally, after 1.9.17- a top (and bottom) margin of 0pt is ignored...)

I re-converted the epub in calibre with 5pt left & right margins, then looked at the stylesheets... no left and right margins were mentioned... Maybe that's why a supposed 5pt margin isn't respected. Strange that there wouldn't be any, as calibre also has the option to convert without any left right margins... But, calibre changed some other things as well (like the titlepage.xhtml, growl!) so I decided to edit the epub straight from the KT (with Sigil) instead of put the newly converted over the book I'm reading. And lo and behold! No delete, margins are back to how I like them *and* KT even remembered the page I was on. Yay.

[Mrs_Often]

Back to Bugs of 2.0.x (2.0.2 in my case): earlier in this thread someone mentioned strange paragraph layouts... I too see a lot of "avoiding" of orphaned lines at the bottom of the page. If a new paragraph starts a few lines above the end of the page, the whole paragraph gets moved to the next page. No thanks! I prefer a full page, it's less messy and it doesn't confuse me thinking the chapter is already over...

[odin500]

Sigh! Firmware does not work for me.
I tried it and was very happy with the speed of the unit ,but then it just stopped responding; I ended up having to revert to firmware 1.7.
Which is not without it's problems either.

[VE7AQ]

I tried V2.0 firmware, but I does not play nice with Calbre yet. I want to fall back. Where can I obtain pre-2.0 firmware to do this?

[PeterT]

@VE7AQ; Please... there are not issues with Calibre and v2.0.

The displayed message mentions unsupported database version. This is nothing more than a "COVER MY A..." message from Calibre.

With the device attached and recognized by calibre, click on the arrow next to "Device" in the calibre menu bar at the top, and and select "Configure this device".

Select the option "Attempt to support newer firmware".

Bingo

DONE

Calibre is perfectly happy with Touch 2.x

[MorganM]

Does anyone have a slow page turn on 2.0 or is it just me? It's a lot faster on 1.9.14 or whatever it is. lol