The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Author Archive

Muon Qt6

12:34 · Filed under Software

A year and a half ago I wrote about how to forwardport (reverse backport) Muon to Ubuntu 24.04. Unfortunately, in the meantime bitrot has occurred and it won’t just compile anymore. But I’m glad to have found a legend named Evgeniy Harchenko has created a Qt6 port. 😉

All you need to get back up and running is their version of QApt (diff) and their version of Muon (diff). Beware, some of the required packages have slightly different names than they do in Debian/Ubuntu.

It’s lovely to have Muon back.

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KOReader 2025.10 “Ghost”

12:58 · Filed under Software

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

Ghost

Apologies, I don’t have much time to write release notes today. As usual there’s been quite a bit of activity. One of the most visible changes is that if you like stable page numbers, artificially generated stable page numbers can now be easily configured under navigation (image) → Settings → Stable page numbers.

Keeping in tune with not spending too much time on release notes, here’s a copy of the included help text:

By default, one screen equals one page. Any change in the book’s formatting will therefore result in renumbering: new total pages, different chapter lengths, new locations in TOC and bookmarks, etc.

Select stable page numbers if you prefer page numbers that are independent of layout settings and consistent across devices:

  1. Publisher page numbers (â„—): normally equivalent to a specific physical edition. Only available if supplied by the publisher.
  2. Characters per page: a page will be counted for this amount of characters (sometimes called logical or synthetic page numbers). Use this if no publisher page numbers are available or if you prefer to have consistent page lengths for all books.

Since stable page numbers can start anywhere on the screen, you can choose to display them in the margin, regardless of other settings.

‘Stable page number list’ shows a table of all stable page numbers and their corresponding screen page numbers.

This month’s logo was contributed by @Sonnenfee

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

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v2025.08...v2025.10 — closed milestone issues

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

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KOReader 2025.08 “Parasol”

22:44 · Filed under Software

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

koreader-202508-parasol-opt

A random sampling from some new features: full-text search now has a start page (#13798); the OPDS browser has gained syncing and “facets” (#14089), which will allow you to change the sort order among other things on supporting feeds. Dictionaries are now more fiddly (the good kind, with presets, #13774), and cloud storage downloads offer a progress bar (#13650). CBR comics (#13780), and of course more supported devices as always. Also ToC search (#13906), improvements to footnote style tweaks (#13554). For more, please see below.

This month’s logo was contributed by @Sonnenfee

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

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v2025.04...v2025.08 — closed milestone issues

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

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Increase swapfile size in Ubuntu

18:02 · Filed under Linux, Ubuntu

The default of 2 GB turned out to be a bit limiting.
There was a nice guide over at here. 
sudo swapoff /swapfile
sudo fallocate -l 16G /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
swapon --show
free -h

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Ignore Electron Sandbox Containment Error, to run Itch or any other app

9:20 · Filed under Software

In short, ELECTRON_DISABLE_SANDBOX=1 /home/frans/.itch/itch.

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KOReader 2025.04 “Full Moon”

18:20 · Filed under Software

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

full-moon

The user guide received a big update, full changelog here.

Dictionaries with images now automatically take the res folder as their point of departure (#12877). This means you’ll have to adjust your dictionary content scripts. If you’re lucky you can simply delete them.

Various changes in plugins:

  • exporter plugin drops support for memos and flomo. You can install them from https://github.com/koreader/contrib if they work for you as is but they won’t receive support here.
  • autofrontlight plugin was removed.
  • backgroundrunner plugin was removed. Third party plugins that rely on it to work need to be updated!

New support for KindleHF. Any Kindle running firmware ≥ 5.16.3 will need the kindlehf package.

This month’s logo was contributed by @Sonnenfee

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

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v2024.11...v2025.04 — closed milestone issues

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

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KOReader 2024.11 “Slang”

21:32 · Filed under Software

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

koreader-2024-11-slangie

Some of you on Android may have had dictionary issues. That should be fixed now.

Connecting to Wi-Fi should be more reliable on platforms where we manage it ourselves, most notably Kobo (koreader/lj-wpaclient#11).

Color is now supported when reflowing (#12085).

This month’s logo was contributed by @Sonnenfee

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

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v2024.07...v2024.11 — closed milestone issues

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

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KOReader 2024.07 “Outside”

18:27 · Filed under Software

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

koreader-sonnenfee-2024-07-outside

Bookmarks have been renamed to annotations to reflect that notes and bookmarks are two sides of the same coin.

A big thanks to @ezdiy and @benoit-pierre for taking on the major effort of updating MuPDF (#11940). Unfortunately or hopefully you won’t notice a thing, but some edge cases in PDF rendering have been fixed.

Likewise our gratitude to @Commodore64user for the many non-touch/keyboard focused improvements.

If you used the built-in update to try out a development version in the last week of June you might need to overwrite the install manually, see #12115.

This month’s logo was contributed by @Sonnenfee

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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

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KOReader 2024.04 “Sourdough”

22:04 · Filed under Software

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

As usual, there have been so many changes that it’s difficult to tell a coherent story about them. One of the more noticeable changes is that the sleep screen menu (formerly known as the screensaver menu) has been reworked (#11549). But there’s also been a lot of work on the backend, updating the build infrastructure and crengine.

This month’s logo was contributed by @Sonnenfee

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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

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Forwardport (reverse backport) Muon to Ubuntu 24.04

23:05 · Filed under Software

Apparently Muon was kicked out of Debian/Ubuntu for being inactive, but since it’ll take a while longer for bitrot to set in, for now a quick forwardport will suffice.

Muon is nice for quickly being able to select multiple things at once and it searches while you type. They’re just a few little UI conveniences. Synaptic is seemingly identical, but there you have to authenticate even before performing any actions, which makes it much more annoying to use.

dget -xu http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/m/muon/muon_5.8.0-2ubuntu1.dsc
cd muon-5.8.0
dch --local ~frenzie "forwardport"
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -sa
cd ..
sudo apt install ./muon_5.8.0-2ubuntu1~frenzie1_amd64.deb

For more info on how to backport packages, see this random search result.

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