The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Author Archive

KOReader 2023.03 “Cherry Blossom”

17:37 · 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-logo-2023-03

Android users on aarch64 are advised not to use the built-in updater until after installing this release (#10068). On systems supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit the 32-bit version will be installed; on systems only supporting 64-bit the upgrade should normally refuse to install.

For advanced users, there’s a new patch manager to easily enable or disable patches (#9970). See here for more information about how to set it up. Be cautious and don’t play with it if you’re not prepared to have to intervene from outside to fix things.

A big under the hood change is partial rerendering (#10124), which enables seeing the results of changed display settings much more quickly:

With EPUB documents (having multiple fragments), text appearance adjustments can be made quicker by only rendering the current chapter.
After such partial renderings, the book and KOReader are in a degraded state: you can turn pages, but some info and features may be broken or disabled (ie. footer info, ToC, statistics…).
To get back to a sane state, a full rendering will happen in the background, get cached, and the document will be seamlessly reloaded after a brief period of inactivity.
An icon in the top left (that you will soon be ignoring) indicates at what step this process is:
Document is partially rendered. Page count, footer info and many things are innacurate. Reading statistics accounting is disabled. You can turn pages, jump links, notice how the new settings look, change settings again…
A full rendering is happening in the background. You can still turn pages, jump links, change settings…
The full rendering is done, but not yet applied: KOReader is waiting for you to be idle to reload. You can still turn pages, jump links, change settings…
You’ve been idle, KOReader is blocked and reloading the document, which should be quick.
When these icons are gone, you are again in a fully sane and working state.
This feature can be disabled per book with tap, or globally with long-press, on Gear > Document > [x] Enable partial renderings.

Cherry blossom credit: https://openclipart.org/detail/254453/cherry-blossoms

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 2023.01 “Winter Ivy”

22:55 · 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-logo-2023-01-fs8

A slightly belated happy new year everyone! It’s a pretty big release, see the technical changelog underneath for details.

A big thanks to @offset-torque for updating the user guide once again, available here. Full changes here.

Ivy from https://www.openclipart.org/detail/307775/ivy-leaves-frame-5

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

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.11 “Froggy”

22:11 · 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-froggy-fs8

I’m filling in last minute for our regular artist. Everything’s well, not to worry. On Android our build system now supports AArch64, but they’re not officially part of the release yet.

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

CommentsTags: ,

Fix Nvidia GPU Not Working in Ubuntu 22.10

21:54 · Filed under Linux

Not exercising patience, I updated to Kubuntu 22.10 on release (but post-beta), and immediately ran into an unsigned kernel module issue.

tl;dr DKMS wasn’t signing things but a fix exists already. See here for all the details. The quickest way to solve the problem is to temporarily add the kinetic-proposed repo to your /etc/apt/sources.list, apt update, grab the new 3.0.6-2ubuntu2 version of DKMS, and enjoy your working Nvidia card. Alternatively you could go through the regular backport procedures, but in this case why bother.


# proposed for dkms fix
# https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dkms/+bug/1991725
deb http://be.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ kinetic-proposed main


This post should be obsolete very soon. 😉

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KOReader 2022.10 “Muhara”

13:17 · 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-2022-10

We skipped last month’s release because I was right in the middle of moving, which serendipitously coincided with fairly drastic changes that needed more time for testing, such as a big rewrite of gestures and multitouch (#9463).

Users of the Dropbox plugin will now be able to use the new short-lived tokens (#9496).

imageOne of the more visible additions is the new Chinese keyboard contributed by @weijiuqiao, based on the stroke input method (#9572). It’s not smart and it requires knowledge of stroke order. A tutorial can be found here, part of which I will reproduce below.

The stroke input method groups character strokes into five categories. Then any character is typed by its stroke order.

Key Stroke type
一 Horizontal or rising stroke
丨 Vertical or vertical with hook
丿 Falling left
丶 Dot or falling right
Turning

For example, to input 大, keys 一丿丶 are used.

Note all turning strokes are input with a single key as long as they are written in one go. So 马 is input with 一.

After getting the intended character, a 分隔(Separate) or 空格(Space) key should be used to finish the input. Otherwise, strokes of the next character will be appended to that of the current one thus changing the character.

Besides, the keyboard layout contains a wildcard key * to use in place of any uncertain stroke.

Swipe north on the 分隔(Separate) key for quick deletion of unfinished strokes.

Logo credit: @bubapet

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 2022.07 “Ladybug”

15:41 · Filed under Software

koreader-2022-07-fs8

The heat a couple of weeks ago got in the way of preparing the release, but here it is!

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.06 “Hawthorne”

22:15 · 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-2022 06-fs8

The user guide has been updated and greatly improved. You can download it here. For the full changelog see here.

There’s also a new vocabulary builder plugin (#9132), which sports some impressive UI design.
screenshot_vb

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.05 “Tulip”

10:31 · 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.

KO May-01

The old F-Droid package has been properly archived. If you use the F-Droid version, please switch to https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid/.

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.03 “Snowdrop”

11:00 · 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.

ko February-01

While this logo was originally intended for last month and the first daffodils are already starting to bloom, the snowdrops aren’t gone just yet. Unfortunately neither is the war.

A big thanks to @comphilip, whose non-touch improvements (#8859, #8877, #8892) have now made all of the most important functionality available to non-touch users.

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.02 “Україна”

15:55 · 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-2022 02

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:

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

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

CommentsTags: ,

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