Help with Calibre Portable and Linux

[bambuko]

Yes, the install I was talking about and the one I am playing with at the moment is local on PC, using library in NAS and local metadata.db - and the latest script works perfect thanks

the only thing is that the message about right portable location appears regardless whether you are using the script for truly portable install or simply to customise local install (in which case it is a bit confusing _ I simply ignored it, but it is not very neat).
Remember that the script can be used for:

# By setting the paths correctly it can be used to run:
# 1 - A "portable calibre" off a USB stick.
# 2 - A network installation with local metadata database
# (for performance) and books stored on a network share
# 3 - A local installation using customised settings

whereas, at the moment, if it can't find it, it seems to assume that it is portable installation 1

I will play with portable one tomorrow (it's getting late here and I got early start tomorrow )

[eschwartz]

Sure thing.

Eventually I will submit this change upstream so other people can make use of it in the meantime I was just holding off a bit to get insight into how it is used in real time.

No pressure.

Anything that could be made more clear, or streamlined, or extra-option-packed, just name it and I will see what I can do.

[bambuko]

One more question please:
I have tried to be clever and created desktop shortcut to the script file and...
I can right click the shortcut to run it in terminal, but left clicking makes no impression on it?

On the other hand, I can either left click the script file directly and it simply runs, or right click it to run in the terminal.

My idea was, that you right click it to run in terminal to see the settings before executing, or left click it to just run (once everything is set-up and tested satisfactorily), but it doesn't work with shortcuts

[eschwartz]

Did you make the .desktop executable?

Also, see the latest version. You can simply blank the BIN_DIR to tell it that you want to rely on the system path.

[bambuko]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Did you make the .desktop executable?

don't forget you are talking to an ignorant and you need to use words of one syllable
so (however embarrasing) - what is .desktop and where do I find it?
I have made calibre-portable.sh executable, but I am not sure I follow you question?

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Also, see the latest version. You can simply blank the BIN_DIR to tell it that you want to rely on the system path.

Yes, using the latest version OK.
When you tell me I can blamk BIN_DIR do you mean:

BIN_DIR=  
if [[ -d "${BIN_DIR}" ]]; then
CALIBRE="${BIN_DIR}/calibre"
echo "PROGRAM FILES: ${BIN_DIR}"
elif [[ -z "${BIN_DIR}" ]]; then
CALIBRE="calibre"
echo "PROGRAM FILES: Using System search path"
else
CALIBRE="calibre"

[eschwartz]

You made a desktop shortcut, yes?

Those are the program.desktop files which usually build menus (and which you can pin to the desktop). Since it has become unpopular to actually allow people to make them via GUIs anymore [shakes fist at Canonical] you usually have to create them in a text editor -- well, that is how I got used to creating them.

Desktop Entry

You can get away with desktop entries in the system location having 644 permissions, but elsewhere IIRC it must be executable.

So I assume you were using a .desktop launcher to give it an icon.

I guess I assumed you knew this stuff already because you mentioned desktop shortcuts, but really there is nothing wrong with not knowing them. No one needs to delve first thing into freedesktop specs. I did because I wanted iconized launchers to custom stuff.



Yes, that is what I meant by blanking BIN_DIR. As you can see, if it is a valid directory, we use the calibre binary from it, elseif the length is zero, use the system search path, else complain loudly that the directory doesn't exist and fallback on the system search path.

[bambuko]

That was most useful reply - thank you!
Yet again I have learned something (not a bad day then? )
I will look at this shortcut business, although my main priority should be sorting out issues with Qt crashing on PC when running Calibre, causing segmentation faults (real PITA )
I know Kovid told me

... just google how to get a backtrace on whatever linux distro you are using...

but it's not so easy when you trying to learn from scratch

BTW when I mess around with BIN_DIR rather than falling back on system search and finding it for me (I know it exists) it simply tells me:

PROGRAM FILES: Using System search path
--------------------------------------------------
TEMPORARY FILES: /tmp/CALIBRE_TEMP
--------------------------------------------------

Press CTRL-C if you do not want to continue
Press ENTER to continue and start Calibre

Starting up Calibre from portable directory "/opt/calibre"
/opt/calibre/calibre-portable.sh: line 203: calibre: command not found
Script completed hit RETURN to close window.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by bambuko

That was most useful reply - thank you!
Yet again I have learned something (not a bad day then? )
I will look at this shortcut business, although my main priority should be sorting out issues with Qt crashing on PC when running Calibre, causing segmentation faults (real PITA )
I know Kovid told me but it's not so easy when you trying to learn from scratch

I would just go with running gdb (GNU debugger):

$ gdb calibre
(gdb) run
(gdb) ### calibre errors out
(gdb) backtrace
(gdb) ### Bunch of debugging info

and then posting it for Kovid to look at, since he probably knows more about debugging calibre than we do.

BTW when I mess around with BIN_DIR rather than falling back on system search and finding it for me (I know it exists) it simply tells me:

PROGRAM FILES: Using System search path
--------------------------------------------------
TEMPORARY FILES: /tmp/CALIBRE_TEMP
--------------------------------------------------

Press CTRL-C if you do not want to continue
Press ENTER to continue and start Calibre

Starting up Calibre from portable directory "/opt/calibre"
/opt/calibre/calibre-portable.sh: line 203: calibre: command not found
Script completed hit RETURN to close window.

Wouldn't that heavily imply that the search path (from within the script, but we haven't exactly changed it...) cannot find "calibre"?

If you change the last line from "$CALIBRE" to "calibre" you should get the same result??

Right before the last line, try inserting "command -v calibre; command -v $CALIBRE" -- they should both point to "/usr/bin/calibre" -- that shouldn't actually be any different than trying to launch calibre directly via the command line, though...

And I assume you have not installed the system calibre to /opt/calibre (default) then.

[bambuko]

Sorry for a long silence.
I am now trying things on a different distro (LinuxMint17.1 cinnamon) and the script finds Config, Library, and Programme fine, but this is what happens when I try to run it in terminal:

Press CTRL-C if you do not want to continue
Press ENTER to continue and start Calibre

Starting up Calibre from portable directory "/media/bambuko/b3fe1f5a-f86b-4425-ad6f-999d97b9def7"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "site.py", line 49, in main
  File "site-packages/calibre/__init__.py", line 21, in <module>
  File "site-packages/calibre/startup.py", line 77, in <module>
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/localization.py", line 129, in set_translators
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/localization.py", line 63, in get_lang
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/config_base.py", line 446, in <module>
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/config_base.py", line 354, in __getitem__
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/config_base.py", line 364, in get
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/config_base.py", line 348, in refresh
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/config_base.py", line 275, in parse
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/lock.py", line 139, in __enter__
  File "site-packages/calibre/utils/lock.py", line 118, in unix_open
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/media/bambuko/b3fe1f5a-f86b-4425-ad6f-999d97b9def7/CalibreConfig/global.py'
/media/bambuko/b3fe1f5a-f86b-4425-ad6f-999d97b9def7/calibre/lib/python2.7/site-packages/calibre/ptempfile.py:27: RuntimeWarning: Parent module 'calibre' not found while handling absolute import

All my previous tests were done with a simple distro running in root so this is first time I come across the delight of password/permissions

After laboriously changing all the permissions (right PITA) managed to get it all going, but still getting the following error messages:

Failed to initialize plugin: ISBNDB (1, 0, 0)
Failed to initialize plugin: <class 'calibre.ebooks.metadata.sources.isbndb.ISBNDB'>
libpng warning: iCCP: Not recognizing known sRGB profile that has been edited

[eschwartz]

But it is actually running? If so, that is good news and *probably* all you need.

I don't know why it cannot import the isbndb module, though. However, that does sound like a calibre problem. (The libpng warning is just noise.)

Perhaps Kovid could figure it out -- it sounds worrying that anything should be failiing to start, although I guess you probably don't usually need that plugin anyway.

[bambuko]

Yes, it is running fine and without "broken pipe" problems I had with another distro.
My concern was that if it is to be truly portable than it would be good to avoid all this permission nonsense - i.e. if every time I want to use it with another Linux machine I have to go through sorting out permissions than it is not really as portable as I was hoping for?
I guess the windows version is easy because permissions and owners etc are not an issue...

[eschwartz]

Hmm, if you use FAT and mount it rwx that would nicely get around the permissions problem... alternatively you can go ahead and make sure your username/uid is identical on every system you use. What do you usually do when you have permission problems with other files?

[PeterT]

Remember that even on Windows IF the USB / Portable Media is formatted with NTFS you will have issues; the only reason it normally doesn't is that most people would format the media with FAT32.

[bambuko]

Until very recently I didn't have this problem because I was using Puppy Linux which runs simply as root and that's it, but now that I switched to LinuxMint it's a whole new ball game with all this confusing nonsense of permissions, priviledges, accounts etc but that's a discussion for another time and since most of the people would be using mainstream distros, testing calibre-portable on LinuxMint is the right way to go about it.
I don't know enough about linux to make sensible suggestions..

As for USB/portable media adn FAT32, isn't it limited in size? I am using at the moment 60Gb portable HDD for the testing.
When I tried it with windows (two desktops and laptop, all running XP) I didn't have any issues (it was formatted NTFS)?

[eschwartz]

NTFS and ext3/4 and in fact newer filesystems in general support privileges (that is the problem) as well as large files and other goodies -- FAT is old enough that it doesn't support filesizes larger than 4GiB. That is per-file, the actual filesystem volume can be far larger. My 32GB flashdrive is quite comfortable on FAT32, and depending on the cluster size you can have a max filesystem size ranging from 2TiB to 16TiB.


(technically, FAT32+ can store 256GiB files, but that isn't very well supported and non-FAT32+ drivers will truncate the files. Which defeats the purpose of using a shoddy filesystem format because it is universally supported... )


tl;dr -- FAT should be perfectly safe.



Why did the NTFS volume work just fine? Because, in addition to using a permissions-supporting filesystem, you also have to remove the permissions from the "Everyone" SID, since I think Windows by default allows everyone rwx except inside an actual userprofile. Linux by default sets restrictive umasks that denies write access to other users -- making an fstab rule for that drive mounting it with a umask of 000 should ensure all new files are created with permissions of 666.
That would mean you don't have to reset the permissions with sudo in the future, and you don't have to use FAT.

Similar discussion: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1502775
What is umask: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/umask