Calibre crashing right after opening in Mac OS

[TortoiseAvenger]

Hi there! I'm building an ebook library after ordering a kobo, and I was really excited to take advantage of all Calibre can do, except... it isn't working. At all.

I'm running Mac OS 10.15.2, Catalina

I downloaded the latest version, and it crashes upon opening.
I downloaded 3.48, and the exact same thing happened.
I followed the instructions on the Calibre FAQ:
- I do not have Voice Over enabled
- I checked my fonts for corruption
- I searched the crash log and found nothing like "Qt: internal: -108: Error ATSUMeasureTextImage..."

There is one step I wasn't sure how to do: System Preferences->System->Universal Access and turn off the setting for enabling access for assistive devices.

But I looked through the accessibility features and nothing seems to be on.

I really want to use this software. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

TA

[kovidgoyal]

post the crash report

[TortoiseAvenger]

Forgive my ignorance, how do I do that, it's huge?

[TortoiseAvenger]

I can't figure out how to save it as a file I can attach....

[TortoiseAvenger]

Copy and pasted and saved as rtf. Maybe that will work.

[kovidgoyal]

From that report it looks like itis crashing while opening a file dialog, deep inside cocoa. Do you have soe finder plugins or something similar installed? You can try setting the CALIBRE_NO_NATIVE_FILEDIALOGS=1 environment variable as described here: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/cus...ment-variables

that will cause calibre to not use finder based file dialogs which should workaround the issue at the cost of less nice file dialogs.

[TortoiseAvenger]

Thank so you much for your help... can you tell me what you mean by "at the cost of less nice file dialogs."...? What I'd experience?

EDIT: I looked up how to do this given the link you provided. I'm comfortable copy and pasting things into the terminal... but I'm not sure how to apply what's there to my situation... ugh.

[TortoiseAvenger]

Sorry for the semi-duplicate reply. Any suggestions?

[kovidgoyal]

You'd experience a different looking file dialog thats all. Just follow th einstructions at the bottom of that post to set the environment variable.

[TortoiseAvenger]

I got a computer friend who is much more experienced at these things.

We got it to work well until we rebooted. Afterward, it still crashes. We have to use the following command every time we reboot.

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/setenv.filedialog.plist

From our understanding that command should automatically load the file even after reboot, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Any advice?

[KevinH]

No need to make a demon. Use ls -al in your home directory in Terminal.app and look for a .bashrc file or .zshrc file and add the

export CALIBRE_NO_NATIVE_FILEDIALOGS=1

line to the end of that file. It will be executed each time you login. No need to use a plist or a LaunchDaemon.

[kovidgoyal]

@KevinH: That wont help, shell startup files are not sourced by launchd on macOS. So environment variables placed there are not available system-wide. Specifically not in programs started by launchd, which is what clicking ona program icon in macOS does. In typical Apple style, there is no reliable way to set environment variables systemwide. The truly annoying part is that even if you manage to get launchd to set an env var, it then wont be available while SSHing into the machine, so you have to set it both in launchd and shell startup scripts or sshd config files.

@TortoiseAvenger: You can try creating /etc/launchd.conf instead. Though I dont know if that still works in modern version of macOS since Apple breaks things with pretty much every macOS release.

[KevinH]

Can't you add it to the Calibre Info.plist? Surely every way of launching Calibre would then see it or will that break code signing? Ala this example:

<key>LSEnvironment</key>
<dict>
     <key>PATH</key>
     <string>/Users/flori/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p362/bin:/Users/flori/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p362@global/bin:/Users/flori/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p326/bin:/Users/flori/.rvm/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:</string>
</dict>

[kovidgoyal]

I'm fairly sure modifying Info.plist will break code signing. In any case I have already implemented a way to conveniently set env vars on macOS to workaround Apple's silliness. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...6840f0f831972f

[KevinH]

Nicely done!