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Tag: epub (Page 3 of 3)

Package updates in the past days

September 11, 2011 / / 24 Comments

I have been updating some of my Slackware packages in the past few days and at least some of them are important enough to write a bit about it.

virtuoso

Along with my packages for KDE 4.7.x I added an updated version of virtuoso “data management server” which powers a lot of the functionality in today’s KDE: However there was a regression in this version 6.1.3 which messed up the display of path names containing non-ascii (i..e Unicide) characters. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271664 for more details about this issue. I applied a fix to my virtuoso-ose package which solves this.

Package available here in the 4.7.1 section: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ as well as all the usual mirrors.

kde-workspace

Martin Graesslin wrote an email to the KDE packagers mailing list with the plea to apply a patch to all binary packages of kde-workspace after he discovered a bug in KWin’s handling of desktop effects which apparently has been present in all versions since 4.0. The bug would cause a performance degradation which becomes worse when more windows are open on the desktop. Martin’s blog article describes how he discovered the bug during his performance analysis of KDE 4.8 code. I have applied the patch he provided in his email to my KDE 4.7.1 kde-workspace package and I will wait for a backport to KDE 4.6.x before attempting to apply the fix to the kdebase-workspace package in there.

Package available here in the 4.7.1 section: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ as well as all the usual mirrors.

vlcgit

This is not a package update per sé. I have been compiling the development version of the VLC media player for a long time (I think I started re-writing the vlc.SlackBuild script for the development snapshots in January 2011). I had varying success with the package, as my build script would “break” from time to time. When someone in the #videolan IRC channel wondered if the development code would work better for high-bandwidth H.264 movies (VLC 1.1.11 drops too many frames) and a VLC developer suggested that the development code has a lot of optimizations in this regard, I decided to release a package based on my SlackBuild script. I called the package directory “vlcgit” and the build script “vlcgit.SlackBuild” but the actual package is named “vlc” so that you can easily update from 1.1.11 to this development snapshot. The vlc program will identity itself as “1.2.0-git” when it starts. I think it is worth your while to try it out because there have been lots of enhancements and additional features in the past year.

VLC 1.2.0 is expected to be released before the end of 2011.

Packages here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlcgit/ (which is a US server so these packages do not contain the mp3 and aac encoders because of patent disputes) and at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlcgit/ (for the version that includes mp3 and aac audio ENcoding capability). Also available on all the other mirrors of course.

flashplayer-plugin

The Adobe people are finally putting good effort into their Linux flash player plugin. One month after the “beta 2” release we now have the “release candidate 1” of the upcoming Flash Player 11. It looks like the releases for Linux and Windows platforms go hand in hand now, which is a reassuring sign that we Linux users are taken seriously.

Package available at http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/

calibre

The calibre download page states that you should “not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below“. Of course you are free to follow that advice, but if you prefer to know how your packages get built, like me, you can still grab the packages that I provide. There is a new release of Calibre every friday and I have been following that release cycle for the past months, releasing updated packages the same day. I use Calibre every day and am happy with my builds.

Get the package here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/calibre/

sigil

If you are seriously into writing or converting e-books, then Calibre is the perfect management and conversion software for the task. But Calibre does not offer an actual epub editor. Epub is an open specification for electronic books and widely used all over the world except for the US apparently where Amazon dominates with the mobi format used for its Kindle. Both mobi and epub formats are quite similar, basically it is HTML text plus a book’s metadata, bundled together in a ZIP archive. Whether you are writing an ebook yourself, or need to clean up an ebook provided by someone else, there is one application which is best suited for this task: Sigil. Sigil is designed to edit epub format only. It contains an embedded HTML tidy which cleans up the book’s HTML code autimatically and an embedded Flightcrew, which assists you in validating your book to the EPUB specification.

The Sigil homepage offers pre-built binaries, but these are quite big. Since they have to work everywhere the binaries include a lot of libraries which we already have in Slackware. The new Sigil maintainer seems to be very responsive so I asked him if he could put up a page with distro-specific packages and add a link to my Slackware package there. He did that right away, and more distros have been added there since.

Get the package fir Sigil here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/sigil/ .

 

Good fun with all of this! Eric

Update Sun Sep 11 15:43:06 UTC 2011:

libbluedevil

Willy Sudiarto Raharjo pointed out that there was another package update and I failed to mention it. The 32bit package “libbluedevil” was not tagged with my “alien” tag initially, and I fixed that by renaming the affected files in the repository.

Remember why tagging your packages is useful? If you use slackpkg to keep your Slackware up to date, then you can blacklist all my packages (since I apply the “alien” tag to all my packages) so that slackpkg does not “see” them anymore. Add this single line to the file “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“:

[0-9]+alien

🙂

E-book management on Slackware

June 19, 2011 / / 23 Comments

Managing your e-book collection

In an earlier post, I hinted about a Slackware package I was trying to create for Calibre. The reason being that I bought my wife an e-reader: a Sony PRS650 with a touch screen using infrared instead of a touch-sensitive layer and pearl e-ink technology. Both those features make for an extremely pleasant reading experience.

However, the Sony Reader software that accompanies the device, is a Windows-only application (of course…) and second, it is not all that much of an application either. Even for Windows, the usual advice you get it is to install Calibre for  managing your e-books – including uploading them to your device.

So, I needed to have Calibre available on my Slackware computers. In fact, I used to have a package for Calibre already! At some point in time the Calibre developer decided to increase the required version of the Python interpreter to 2.7.1. And since Slackware ships Python 2.6.6 to this day, I was no longer able to compile updated packages  (I got stuck at 0.7.23 but I guess it would have been possible to keep compiling Calibre as far as 0.7.45).

I still wanted a recent version of Calibre, the software has updates about once a week! So I spent quite a lot of time researching how I could add an embedded Python interpreter plus several supporting Python modules into the Calibre package.

And I think I succeeded. I have uploaded Slackware packages for calibre-0.8.6 to my repository yesterday (for Slackware 13.1 as well as Slackware 13.37). During the period where I did not actually have an e-reader at my disposition (it arrived at the house only a few days ago) I used the testing genius of my pal mrgoblin who happened to have an e-reader device in his possession. His beta tests made me realize that I was missing the dbus-python module which is needed for Calibre to recognize when a device is plugged into the computer.

I must say, using Calibre is a lot of fun! I have a small collection of e-books and after installing the Slackware package, I was able to transfer my books to the Sony device and read them there. Then, I managed to almost brick the device by ripping out the USB cable before selecting “Eject Device” in Calibre… let that be a warning for prospective users! It took a lot of reading about soft and hard resets before I had a working e-reader again. I had to reset the device to factory defaults – which means you lose all the books that were already present on the device. It was a good learning experience with only minor inconvenience (because I had transfered only two books to the e-reader at the time) but I kept feeling my wife’s prying eyes in the back of my neck… she was not too pleased with seeing her birthday present getting bricked only 15 minutes after unpacking it!

Calibre will also be very useful for everyone who owns a Kindle (Amazon’s own e-reader). The Kindle only accepts Amazon’s own MOBI format and refuses the “open” EPUB format (which is the most commonly used e-book format outside the US). Using Calibre, you can easily convert your EPUB collection to MOBI format – when you select an EPUB file and tell it to upload it to a Kindle, Calibre will show a dialog that prompts for the automatic conversion to the Kindle’s format. Perfect!

OK, enough talk. Get a package and/or SlackBuild script at:

and don’t forget to also install the icu4c and podofo packages; these two are the only dependencies now. If you want to build the package yourself, be warned if you are running Slackware-current. There is a bug in the “file” utility in Slackware-current which prevents it from recognizing a ZIP file as such, and this bug will cause the SlackBuild script to fail. Thanks to Francesco Allertsen who first ran into this issue and reported it to me, a quick fix is to change the line 235 in the calibre.SlackBuild script:

if $(file ${SOURCE[$i]} | grep -qi “: zip”); then

to:

if $(echo ${SOURCE[$i]} | grep -qi “.zip$”); then

I hope to see a fixed “file” soon. A bugfix has been applied to the file repository already, so file-5.08 should detect ZIP files correctly when it gets released.

Have fun! Eric

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