Connecting a Kobo Aura HD in FreeBSD

[ottdmk]

Hi,

Just wanted to share my findings on trying to get Calibre fulling working on my FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE amd64 box. My trusty Kobo Aura HD just would not attach automatically. Mounting it to a directory and doing things that way is suboptimal, as I would like to use the Kobo Extended plugin.

First, I tried all of Koyal's suggestions. Unfortunately that didn't get me very far. So I dusted off my rusty programming skills and set about trying to track down the problem. (Never programmed in Python, so that added a bit to my confusion.)

Running calibre in a terminal gave me the following error message: (forgive me, the line numbers are off due to the debugging statements I've added.):

Unable to open device <calibre_plugins.kobotouch_extended.device.driver.KOBOTOUCHEXTENDED object at 0x822273510>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/device.py", line 194, in do_connect
    dev.open(detected_device, self.current_library_uuid)
  File "/usr/local/lib/calibre/calibre/devices/usbms/device.py", line 891, in open
    self.open_freebsd()
  File "/usr/local/lib/calibre/calibre/devices/usbms/device.py", line 831, in open_freebsd
    raise DeviceError(_('Unable to mount the device'))
DeviceError: Unable to mount the device

Messing around, I discovered that line 718 (fresh downloaded 1.48 file) in open_freebsd (devices/usbms/device.py) was doing this:

paths = manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('usb.serial',d.serial)

which, for my box, returned:

/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_2237_4193_N204B42111283_if0

Now, the problem shows up later. Line 728 is written thus:

dpaths = manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('storage.originating_device', path)

The problem is that no device has

/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_2237_4193_N204B42111283_if0

as its storage.originating_device entry. Instead, they have

/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_2237_4193_N204B42111283_if0_scsi_host

, which is a child of the first one.

Now, to get around this, I've used an ugly hack of inserting this code just above line 728:

mypaths = manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('info.parent', path)
                    mypath = mypaths[0]

. This finds the if0_scsi_host entry, which allows the rest of the code to work properly.

I'm hoping someone who's more experienced with Python and its interactions with DBUS & HAL might be able to help get this into a proper patch.

[kovidgoyal]

I have no experience with HAL, which as I recall is an awful mess, but from what you describe, simply doing

dpaths = manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('storage.originating _device', path) + manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('info.parent', path)

should do the trick.

[ottdmk]

Well, I forgot one important thing: I changed the dpaths= line (line 728) to take the new mypath variable. The manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('storage.originating _device' call needs the value that my manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('info.parent' call finds, and without it the rest of the code fails.

[kovidgoyal]

Yes,but doing this

dpaths = manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('storage.originating _device', path) + manager.FindDeviceStringMatch('info.parent', path)

means that dpaths will now include both matches on originating_device and matches on info.parent, so if no matches are found for originating_device, info_parent will be used.