I just completed a from scratch, from source install of calibre on my Fedora 11 beta laptop. As documented a couple of posts back, the laptop was installed using the Fedora 11 live USB install method. Here’s what I had to add, to get calibre to build and install:

For building calibre, I needed the following; just do a yum install; there will be a long list of dependencies brought in:

1. python-setupdocs
2. python-setuptools
3. sip
4. PyQt4
5. PyQt4-devel
6. gcc
7. gcc-c++

Finally, do this:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/qt4/bin

Then, python setup.py build should cleanly build calibre.

To install calibre, I had to yum install the following:

1. python-mechanize
2. python-clientform
3. python-lxml
4. python-dateutil
5. python-imaging
6. python-BeautifulSoup

The python setup.py install worked without complaints. The calibre icon appeared in the Fedora menu, and all is well.

For me, calibre segfaults when being called from the Fedora menu, and the “View MOBI” option is selected. “View PDF” works fine. When I invoke calibre from the command line, all the view options work, irrespective of format. Not necessarily a calibre bug; I’ll check out the calibre release notes and trouble ticket, and poke around my setup a bit.

-k-

fedora11, calibre, kindle

Fedora 11 includes an upgrade to python 2.6. This is a good thing: I can now install the latest, greatest calibre. calibre is a tool for managing e-book libraries, and is the descendant of the libprs500 software suite, which I used with success on the Sony e-reader.

With the Sony, I would have been totally in the weeds without libprs500. There was no way short of using a Windows computer to get one’s own content onto the device. libprs500 kept my Windows-free streak alive. After getting my Kindle, I thought the libprs/calibre tools wouldn’t be needed any longer, since the Kindle shows up as yet another USB storage device.

I had a previous version of calibre installed, pre Fedora upgrade. It is much more robust than the libprs500, and the graphical interface is much neater and cleaner.

After sending several PDFs and other documents to Amazon’s conversion service, I have not been overly impressed with the quality and readability of the converted items. libprs/calibre’s MOBI conversions are typically much better than anything else I’ve tried.

So, with part of the Kindle allure being the possibility of having a lot of sysadmin manuals on one easy-to-use device, I’m back on the calibre bandwagon.

I always install calibre from source on my Fedora systems; there are a lot of dependencies to install for calibre to work. I use the time tested method of build, install, run, let stuff blow up as missing dependencies are found, install missing dependencies. Repeat process until everything comes up cleanly.

Maybe I’ll take a shot at making a Fedora RPM for calibre, if for no other reason than to be ready for the next upgrade to Fedora.

-k-

calibre, kindle, fedora, fedora11