My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Calibre 6.14.1 – I finally made it past 6.11…

News for people who no longer read paper books!
Well 😉 I guess everyone needs paper from time to time, but in all honesty, my eyes are getting worse and an E-reader is the optimal device for me when I want to read books – I can enlarge the font and it has a night light.

Calibre 6.x is a really cool-looking and versatile graphical Python3 application, using PyQt to build the graphical interface based on Qt6 widgets. It is the application to use if you have a collection of E-books and an E-reader, and want a decent library management program to move these E-books onto your E-reader. In addition, it offers a good ebook-viewer application for your computer and even an impressively powerful E-book editor.

As you may know, I have been creating native Slackware packages for Calibre for many years. However I had some issues with the compilation of any Calibre release past version 6.11.0. Kovid Goyal, the developer of this e-book management software, removed some of the content from his release tarballs and since version 6.12.0 requires that the build process generates these required files instead.

This meant that I had to study the changes in the Python files which are used to build Calibre to discover how the missing pieces where getting downloaded and compiled during a ‘bootstrap’ build. That took a while but I found a way to get these sources in place before starting the build.
So now again, Calibre packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current will be getting refreshes in my repository.

Download the new Calibre 6.14.1 packages from my repository or any mirror (like my own US mirror). No external dependencies, works out of the box on Slackware 15.0 or -current.

 

Have fun! Eric

7 Comments

  1. Francisco

    Hi Eric. Thank you for your effort and contribution to deliver this Calibre Version. I am builing my HomeLab with Proxmox + Slackware. I feel now It is the time to test and try Calibre. Thanks again.

    Our eyes are getting worse to read books… 🙂 time and years for all of us…. 🙂

    Thanks again Eric.

  2. Konrad J Hambrick

    Thanks Eric.
    Running calibre-6.14.1-x86_64-1alien here on Slackware64 15.0 +MultiLib and everything works very well.
    — kjh

  3. Didier Spaier

    Hello Eric,

    I tried your package and noticed running it that it missed a few libs shipped in ffmpeg, because in Slint-15.0 we ship ffmpeg version 5.1.2 instead of the version 4.4.1 shipped in Slackware-15.0, so rebuilt the package with no issue. I am impressed by your SlackBuild, thanks!

    The UI is partially accessible with speech using the Orca screen reader, probably not enough to be usable by blind people, but I will request blind Slint users to try it to check this assumption. For your information the current version of speech-dispatcher is 0.11.4 instead of 0.11.1 by default in /sources, but I don’t think that matters much.
    Keep up the good work!

    Cheers,
    Didier

  4. Didier Spaier

    Follow-up (kind of): I have included calibre-6.14.1 in the latest batch of updates for Slint 15.0: http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-15.0/ChangeLog.txt

    No feedback yet but it’s fairly recent and we are Saturday 😉

    Thanks again Eric!

    • alienbob

      I am going to embed the ffmpeg libraries into my next Calibre packages so that you should be able to use my stock package with Slint.

  5. Konrad J Hambrick

    Thanks for calibre-6.16.0-x86_64-1alien.txz Eric
    Installed this morning and it is working very well on my Slackware64 15.0 +MultiLib LapTop
    — kjh

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑