Can't open books, suspect xdg-open

[Eoaka]

Hi, I hope this finds you well.

I'm having trouble opening books, any books, on calibre 2.49 on OpenSUSE Leap with XFCE. I get the following error message:

Failed to open URI "file:///home/james/Calibre%20Library/Unknown/the%20c%20book%20(2)".

Error when getting information for file '/home/james/Calibre%20Library/Unknown/the%20c%20book%20(2)': No such file or directory.

The same thing happens for epubs and pdfs.

Now I'm pretty sure it's related to xdg-open passing along %20 instead of handling the spaces properly. I found this post on this forum from a few years ago: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=15 Unfortunately this is referencing LXDE not XFCE, and xdg-open seems to have changed anyway.

uname-a: Linux linux-svb1 4.1.20-11-default #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Mar 18 14:42:07 UTC 2016 (0a392b2) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I've searched around for this quite a bit before asking. Also maybe I should be filing a bug report somewhere, since this is a vanilla install from the repos for both xdg-utils and Calibre. Thanks in advance for your time!

[gbm]

Originally Posted by Eoaka

Hi, I hope this finds you well.

I'm having trouble opening books, any books, on calibre 2.49 on OpenSUSE Leap with XFCE. I get the following error message:

Failed to open URI "file:///home/james/Calibre%20Library/Unknown/the%20c%20book%20(2)".

Error when getting information for file '/home/james/Calibre%20Library/Unknown/the%20c%20book%20(2)': No such file or directory.

The same thing happens for epubs and pdfs.

Now I'm pretty sure it's related to xdg-open passing along %20 instead of handling the spaces properly. I found this post on this forum from a few years ago: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=15 Unfortunately this is referencing LXDE not XFCE, and xdg-open seems to have changed anyway.

uname-a: Linux linux-svb1 4.1.20-11-default #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Mar 18 14:42:07 UTC 2016 (0a392b2) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I've searched around for this quite a bit before asking. Also maybe I should be filing a bug report somewhere, since this is a vanilla install from the repos for both xdg-utils and Calibre. Thanks in advance for your time!

Uninstall the repos version of calibre and use the official calibre binary installer.

http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux

Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below.

bernie

[kovidgoyal]

I gave up on xdg-open a long time ago. Now in all my system, I just replace it with my own 100 line implementation. I suggest you do the same. Trying to get xdg-open to work with anything other than the major desktop environments is an exercise in needless frustration.

[eschwartz]

This problem is completely unrelated to calibre.

Assuming your distro has the latest version of XFCE in their repos, you'll need to file a bug report for XFCE upstream, to get them to fix their dedicated file opener (exo-open) so it accepts urlencoded file:/// links.
(calibre uses Qt's native functions for opening files, which simply pass urlencoded file:/// urls to xdg-open -- this is basic UI toolkit file management at its finest. )

AFAIK this was supposed to be fixed here and here, so unless they had another regression, this is your distro's fault for being out-of-date.
(And a thread on MobileRead, here.)

[Eoaka]

Thanks a lot everyone for taking the time to look at this. I appreciate it!

[Eoaka]

Sorry to bump this, but I wanted to post my solution in case anyone else runs into this.

For whatever reason openSUSE is behind with exo-open on both tumbleweed and leap. To get around this I built exo-0.10.7 from source, installed exo-open and and everything works.