Building Calibre from source for Raspberry Pi

[wayt]

The latest version of Calibre available in the Raspbian (Wheezy) repositories for Raspberry Pi is 0.85, which has some bugs and lacks some features for my use case (a digital sheet music display for a grand piano). So I have been working on building the latest version of Calibre from source.

I was able to satisfy nearly all the dependencies by using libraries already available in the RasPi repositories, with the notable exception of ICU--I downloaded source for ICUv49 and built it successfully (at least no errors reported in make or installation).

However compilation of Calibre fails after the extensions are compiled with an error related to ICU:

pi@BaldwinR1 ~/opt/calibre_source/calibre $ python setup.py install --prefix=/home/pi/opt

*
* Running build
*


####### Building calibre style #######
make: Nothing to be done for `first'.

####### Building extension hunspell #######

####### Building extension _regex #######

####### Building extension speedup #######

####### Building extension html #######

####### Building extension tokenizer #######

####### Building extension _patiencediff_c #######

####### Building extension icu #######

####### Building extension sqlite_custom #######

####### Building extension chmlib #######

####### Building extension chm_extra #######

####### Building extension magick #######

####### Building extension lzx #######

####### Building extension freetype #######

####### Building extension woff #######

####### Building extension msdes #######

####### Building extension cPalmdoc #######

####### Building extension bzzdec #######

####### Building extension matcher #######

####### Building extension podofo #######

####### Building extension pictureflow #######

####### Building extension progress_indicator #######

####### Building extension unrar #######

####### Building extension libusb #######

####### Building extension libmtp #######

*
* Running gui
*

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 99, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "setup.py", line 85, in main
    command.run_all(opts)
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/setup/__init__.py", line 181, in run_all
    self.run_cmd(self, opts)
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/setup/__init__.py", line 175, in run_cmd
    self.run_cmd(scmd, opts)
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/setup/__init__.py", line 178, in run_cmd
    cmd.run(opts)
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/setup/gui.py", line 41, in run
    self.build_forms(summary=opts.summary)
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/setup/gui.py", line 63, in build_forms
    from calibre.gui2 import build_forms
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/src/calibre/__init__.py", line 21, in <module>
    from calibre.startup import winutil, winutilerror
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/src/calibre/startup.py", line 178, in <module>
    from calibre.utils.icu import title_case, lower as icu_lower, upper as icu_upper
  File "/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/src/calibre/utils/icu.py", line 28, in <module>
    raise RuntimeError('Failed to load icu with error: %s' % err)
RuntimeError: Failed to load icu with error: /home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/src/calibre/plugins/icu.so: undefined symbol: usearch_first
/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/src/calibre/ptempfile.py:27: RuntimeWarning: Parent module 'calibre' not found while handling absolute import
  import shutil

pi@BaldwinR1 ~/opt/calibre_source/calibre $ locate icu.so
/home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/src/calibre/plugins/icu.so
/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/plugins/icu.so

As you can see from the results of the locate command, icu.so does exist in the calibre source tree and plugins folder, but the make routine is unhappy with it for reasons I don't understand.

Any suggestions about how to fix this?

[kovidgoyal]

See the line:

RuntimeError: Failed to load icu with error: /home/pi/opt/calibre_source/calibre/src/calibre/plugins/icu.so: undefined symbol: usearch_first

That means that the linker could not locate the usearch_first symbol in your ICU DLLs. http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/...fee8473e0353d4 You can use

LD_DEBUG=all

to get more information. But most likely the linker is picking up some stub ICU library from somewhere.

[wayt]

Thanks for the quick reply, Kovid.

The problem was that I had a previous version of calibre (0.85, from the apt-get repository) installed. I removed that and, after satisfying a few more dependencies, successfully built and installed Calibre 1.45 to my Raspberry Pi.

It works great!

[wayt]

Now that I have an up-to-date version of Calibre running on the Pi, I'd like to try to trim unnecessary features from the program so that it is more responsive. (In the default state, it takes a few seconds to respond to keystrokes or mouse clicks.)

I'm using Calibre to organize a large library of PDF files only (sheet music), and to open them in a third-party viewer for display on a local monitor.

I have no need for the app's support for other document formats, conversion, or device connections (although it would be nice to keep the content server operable).

Are there options I can pass to setup.py when building from source to exclude unneeded features and thereby improve performance? Perhaps sections of extensions.py (and other files?) I can comment out?

I'm writing a column about this project for IEEE Spectrum and will be making a video of it in operation, and I'm hoping to make Calibre look as sleek as possible.

[kovidgoyal]

Unused features dont slow down calibre. They are loaded on demand. Your biggest performance improvement will come from hiding the Tag Browser. You can also disable animations in the look & feel section of preferences.

[wayt]

Done, and done. Thanks!

[tombs]

wayt did you document your installation process? I am attempting to build from source on a cubietruck but failing. Thanks

[eschwartz]

Might be worth noting that Archlinuxarm builds all the Archlinux i686/x64 PKGBUILDS under arm as well. Unless special sauce patches are needed it should work fine, if not, you can contribute those patches.

Arch Linux gets frequent updates and calibre is currently available as the latest stable beta 1.204.1-2

[tombs]

Thanks, I will have a look. Been awhile since I ran Arch on my cubieboards.

[wayt]

tombs, let us know if the prebuilt doesn't work for you, and I'll try to help you build from source.

Basically I followed the directions Kovid posted here:
http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux
and used apt-get to install latest available repository version of everything on the list of dependencies. After that, it was an iterative process of executing 'sudo python setup.py install', guessing from the error messages returned by make what dependencies remained to be installed, and trying again once I had added the needed libraries.

The only dependency I had to build from source was ICU, because the version in the repository was too out of date. I got the ICU code here:
http://site.icu-project.org/download/49

[tombs]

I finally got archlinux running on my cubietruck. Calibre beta running nicely. Thanks all.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by tombs

I finally got archlinux running on my cubietruck. Calibre beta running nicely. Thanks all.

Nice!

The regular autobuild works fine?

[Katsunami]

I've been implementing an embedded system, based on a Pi board, running a completely stripped Raspbian, apart from Xorg and Openbox (using a browser to control it) . It executes its task well, but it is too slow for general usage such as webbrowsing. I can't believe Calibre is usable on a Pi.