Touch How To update (manually) the firmware of your Kobo ereader

[markemark]

Quick update to note that the 1.9.16 update can be manually installed from:
http://download.kobobooks.com/firmwa...ate-1.9.16.zip

[taming]

That update has the "fix" that lets you keep shortlist as the default choice on your carousel.

[ereaderbug]

Could someone please tell me how to install this update manually without registering and installing the desktop software? I do not plan registering the Kobo Touch if I can help it. Any help is greatly appreciated. my current firmware version is 1.9.9 (r31493 8/19/11).
Thanks.

Originally Posted by markemark

Quick update to note that the 1.9.16 update can be manually installed from:
http://download.kobobooks.com/firmwa...ate-1.9.16.zip

[frankieGom]

Originally Posted by ereaderbug

Could someone please tell me how to install this update manually without registering and installing the desktop software? I do not plan registering the Kobo Touch if I can help it. Any help is greatly appreciated. my current firmware version is 1.9.9 (r31493 8/19/11).
Thanks.

Download the zip file to your PC and extract the contents (preserving the directory structure) to your Kobo's .kobo directory. Switch off, switch on and the new version should get installed automatically.

François

[ereaderbug]

That worked, thank you François!

[clc]

Originally Posted by ndr76

Yes I'm having the same problem.
It might be possible that the state of whether the setup has been done or not is saved in the .kobo folder. So once you have set it up just make a copy of all its flash content, including the .kobo folder.
After a factory reset, all you will have to do is just restore all the content (delete the 2 pre-existing folders beginning with '.' first).
I have't tried it yet, but I will as soon as I get my hands on a Windows machine.

I just upgraded from 1.9.11 to 1.9.16, and was forced to create an account with the desktop app (yuck). I used the 2.1.6 desktop app under Wine.

First, though, I backed up my .kobo directory. Afterwards, I diff-ed the new and old .kobo directories.

Grand total of the differences:

• new .kobo/affiliate.conf file, with:
  [General]
  affiliate=Kobo
• new .kobo/epoch.conf file, with the Unix epoch:
  1325286005
• new .kobo/timezone.conf, with my timezone:
  America/Denver
• 281 new .kobo/images/*.parsed files (perhaps for recommendations, etc?)

[clc]

Originally Posted by clc

Grand total of the differences:

• new .kobo/affiliate.conf file, with:
  [General]
  affiliate=Kobo
• new .kobo/epoch.conf file, with the Unix epoch:
  1325286005
• new .kobo/timezone.conf, with my timezone:
  America/Denver
• 281 new .kobo/images/*.parsed files (perhaps for recommendations, etc?)

Oh, and it created a .windows-serial file, with "0\n". Perhaps if I wasn't on Wine, it would be a real serial number.

I haven't yet checked which of these change(s) cause it to stop bugging you about the desktop app. If anyone does experimentation around this, let us know....

[rashkae]

According to another post (I haven't tested it, since I've pretty much dumped the Kobo reader.), it's actually the two records in the user table of the kobo.sql file. (file can be opened, examined and edited with SQLLite.). The contents of the records doesn't even matter, so long as they are there. Presumably, that means, you could just make up fake data for the two records. It would be intersting to know if proting a kobo.sql file between two devices would cause problems or not. Mayhaps someone could upload a bare bones .sql file that interested people could put on their device after a factory reset.

[justywusty]

i had troubles installing the 2.4.0 update via wifi, so i'm going to do it this way. when i connected to my kobo, i noticed that there's a file called "kobo update 2.4.0.zip" in the .kobo folder from the failed wifi attempts...should i delete that file (is it safe)?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by justywusty

i had troubles installing the 2.4.0 update via wifi, so i'm going to do it this way. when i connected to my kobo, i noticed that there's a file called "kobo update 2.4.0.zip" in the .kobo folder from the failed wifi attempts...should i delete that file (is it safe)?

It should be safe to delete that file. The Kobo upgrade routine would unpack it during the upgrade process and delete it after that. What I am curious about is if you could get some information about the file before deleting it. File size, hash if you can generate that, copy the file to your computer and unpack it to see if the files inside are corrupted, any other information you can come up with. Mostly to see if the file is corrupted during the WiFi sync or if the Kobo upgrade is simply not seeing and unpacking the file.

Regards,
David

[mobreada]

Thank you for this ancient forum thread from 2011.

I have an ancient Kobo Touch that I never use, and I recently learned that Kobo continued to make firmware updates for the device almost ten years after release. See: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_Firmware_Releases.

On that MobileRead page, my Kobo Touch is called a "Mk3". Well I downloaded the most recent firmware zip for my device (v4.26.16704 from 17 February 2021) into the .kobo folder after attaching using USB. After ejecting it restarted and now I'm on the latest Kobo Touch firmware.

As best I can tell everything seems to work fine after jumping likely 9 years forward in the firmware. Your mileage may vary.

Why you would want to do this, I'm not sure. But it was great.