The One with the Thoughts of Frans

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.

This month there’s been a fairly big change on PocketBook. The rendering is now handled directly with inkview (#8727) This may result in some visual differences, but in principle it should work more dependably.

Terminal emulator

The terminal emulator has been completely rewritten, and it’s now a real vt52 emulator (#8636).

Speaking of the shell on a device, whether directly on the device through a terminal emulator or using SSH, you might want to put run some programs that aren’t easily available. At this point you have three options:

1. Compile your own. Doesn’t sound very attractive? I agree. But in case you want to, we have specialized toolchains available. The very same which are used to build KOReader.
2. Our own @NiLuJe has created precombined bundles of tools for Kindle and for Kobo.
3. Many a Linux distro such as Debian provides precompiled packages for various ARM architectures. You can use these through a chroot. See some basic info here, which depends on sudo apt-get install debootstrap qemu-user-static schroot. The advantage is that once you have this set up, you can just apt install elinks inside the chroot. See the picture of my H2O running Elinks showing the tweakers.net website. If this interests you, here’s my quickly cobbled together start-debian.sh script to serve as inspiration.

#!/bin/sh
mnt=/mnt/onboard/.adds/debian/debian

mount $mnt/../debian.img $mnt

mount -o bind /dev $mnt/dev
mount -t devpts devpts $mnt/dev/pts
mount -t proc proc $mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs sysfs $mnt/sys
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs $mnt/tmp

chroot $mnt /bin/bash

umount $mnt/dev/pts
umount $mnt/dev
umount $mnt/proc
umount $mnt/sys
umount $mnt/tmp

umount $mnt

Noteworthy Changes

We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:

• Translator: copy translation to clipboard or save to note (#8669) @hius07
• fix selection of single CJK char (#8680) @poire-z
• SDL & Android: Do not set FM banner on resize (#8678) @yparitcher
  This prevents a crash when resizing the window.
• Battery Stat: Fix remaining & per hour numbers (#8688, #8694) @yparitcher @hius07
• A few Kobo/sunxi tweaks & fixes (#8672, #8711) @NiLuJe
  • Initial support for the Sage PowerCover (i.e., display its status in the TouchMenu footer).
    I left the footer & co alone, because I don’t really care about seeing that much detail in those other contexts.
  • Fix the update progress bar on sunxi. I had noticed that is was hella broken on the Elipsa & Sage with the latest FW (while I could have sworn it originally worked on the Elipsa…).
  • Above fix led me to a simpler workaround for similar issues with the crash screen.
  • Set the CPU governor on all cores if possible (that’s a NOP in practice, because we don’t change the governor on SMP devices).
  • Accurately refresh the charging LED state on startup & resume, accounting for the PowerCover (i.e., charging == charging the cover).
  • Stash enableCPUCores in CanvasContext, to avoid pulling in Device in Document (re #8579).
• Autosuspend: fix ‘Disable’ not disabling (#8684) @zwim
• Support non-touch device to choose file or folder (#8696) and improve non-touch bottom menu usability (#8712) @comphilip
• FocusManager:focusTopLeftWidget(): only if hasDPad (#8737) @comphilip
• NewsDownloader: new option to allow EPUB volumization (#8263) @roygbyte
• crengine: non-linear fragments and list item tweaks (#8700) @poire-z
• Handle arrow keys and enter in emulator text fields (#8716) @johnbeard @poire-z
• Various UX fixes (#8720) @hius07
• UI font fallbacks: allow using more “Noto Sans xyz” (#8722) @poire-z
• wallabag : fixes synchronization when “send review as tags” is checked (#8733) @agallou
• PocketBook: handle rendering of interface and books directly with inkview (#8727) @rjd22
• Terminal emulator: full rewrite, real vt52 emulator (#8636) @zwim
• PocketBook: add support for PB617 (Basic Lux 3) (#8740) @roshavagarga
• remove send2ebook plugin (#8747) @pazos
• Reading statistics: various fixes and tweaks (#8745) @poire-z
• PageBrowser: allow changing nb of chapter levels shown (#8772) @poire-z
• Kobo: Use the right input protocol on the Nia (#8794) @NiLuJe
• ReadHistory: force reload history after files changes (#8813) @hius07
• File manager: free long-press on Home button; open file with TextViewer (#8821) @hius07
• BiDi: allow inverting for Document UI elements (TOC) (#8673) @yparitcher

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS