Calibre
 

I guess that when aaa_elflibs was changed on 19 July 2019, the removal of libicudata.so.* and others killed calibre-3.40.1 from alien slackbuilds. I spent hours recompiling calibre to find that it also will not run. Help.

Just try to install alien "icu4c-compat" package.

A foolproof alternative is to use Kovid Goyal's own install script (see https://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux ) since it also installs all dependencies. Of course I generally prefer proper slackware packages, but in some cases I've found it simpler just to install the bin files into /opt, instead of building or waiting for packages of upgraded programs that I use frequently.

Thanks very much for letting me know about icu4c-compat. Calibre works again.
Compiling calibre on an older Vaio laptop was a torture. I stopped checking on the build after 8 hours, and let the computer run overnight. Even though the slackbuild reported that it had successfully built calibre-3.40.1-i586-1alien.txz, calibre would not run, and actually had failed to build any calibre binaries. Not sure what happened, but it's working fine again. Thanks.

My SlackBuild just packages what the install script installs.

https://github.com/duganchen/my_slac...bre.SlackBuild

I submitted a "calibre-bin" script to SBo, it repackages the official binary tarball that includes all dependences.

Again a big thanks for your script which I have just used to update to the latest Calibre. Nice script and Calibre is an absolutely amazing application!

Interestingly enough Kindle users on -current are going to be bitten pretty badly by this kernel bug:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203973

At the bottom you will see the Calibre developer weighing in...

Thanks for the info andrew.46. This has been pretty annoying.
I ended up doing all io related device operations via a filemanager.

Huh, and here I thought I'd screwed something up. Thanks for the head's up, andrew.46.

Indeed! It was like an old friend suddenly turned on me when Calibre failed to produce my books :). On my own system I have solved the issue by compiling a new kernel (5.2.5 although anything after 4.19.50 should do the trick) with this patch.... Calibre now runs as before.

Another foolproof alternative were if mr Kovid Goyal could provide just a one file AppImage. I even emailed him asking for that months ago, but never got any answer.

Is anyone having any joy with this on a stock current setup yet?

Neither Alien's 4.2.0 or the SBo Calibre-bin 4.5.0 work here with my Kindle Paperwhite 3 without first reverting kernel commit bd8309de0d60838eef6fb575b0c4c7e95841cf73.

With that commit reverted all is good

Without, stock, much unhappiness...

etc etc, with failed transfers, a corrupted and read-only filesystem on the Kindle.

#echo "write through" > /sys/block/sdc/queue/write_cache

does not help.

Any ideas please?

I was putting some thought into building a Docker image that could be used to build a Calibre AppImage, but as soon as I actually wrote those words I realized how ridiculous they were.

Keep in mind that a Calibre AppImage these days should really have its own bundled Python 2 interpreter, as the port to Python 3 is still a work in progress.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/tree/py3

I am still routinely reversing that commit when I rebuild a kernel, I feel a little better that somebody else has bumped into the same issue...