Guidance on Sigil with Ubuntu

[Justin_Thought]

Hello, all, I haven't posted on this forum since forever, but I'm moving into a new world, that of Linux, on a Raspberry Pi, so I'd like some help from some of the many Linux users.

Disclosure: I'm not running the latest, or even close, on my Windows system. My install file is labeled Sigil-09.09, even though Help->About shows Version 0.9.9. built 2017.12.21. The reason is, I'm one of those who stubbornly clung to the on-screen text entry once offered in Sigil. Yeah, I know the html is a bit kludgy, but I've managed to overcome those shortcomings. I'm happy with what I have.

So, I'm looking to recreate that environment on my new platform when it arrives.

The instructions I have for installing Sigil on Ubuntu states you have to compile the source into a working application, and gives instructions on how to do so. So I'm searching unsuccessfully for that version (or a recent previous if necessary), or one recommended by the Sigil gurus, to achieve what I want.

If you feel it's worth your time, I'd be happy to follow along in your wake. Thanks in advance!

[KevinH]

Just to be perfectly clear, ... you do not want to build a recent version of Sigil from source on Ubuntu, but instead build a really old version of Sigil circa version 0.9.9, which uses the now defunct QtWebKit. And you want to do this on a Raspberry Pi?

Is that correct?

If so, I very much doubt that at all doable or even possible as I am not sure the old QtWebKit source code is still around and even if so if it is buildable on a Raspberry Pi.

You do know about newer Sigil's External XEditor Preferences and Sigil's companion program PageEdit, right? PageEdit is easily launched from within Sigil and does much of the wysiwyg editing that the older BookView enabled. Check out the screen shots at: https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/PageEdit and you will see how close to the old BookView it truly is.

You would stand a much higher chance of building current Sigil and PageEdit from source on a recent Ubuntu version.

Either way good luck with that.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Justin_Thought

The instructions I have for installing Sigil on Ubuntu states you have to compile the source into a working application, and gives instructions on how to do so. So I'm searching unsuccessfully for that version (or a recent previous if necessary), or one recommended by the Sigil gurus, to achieve what I want.

If you feel it's worth your time, I'd be happy to follow along in your wake. Thanks in advance!

v0.9.9 is truly ancient, but if you insist on needing to build/install it, it's quite easy to browse the source (including the build documentation) by the version tag:

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/tree/0.9.9/docs

Even the oldest version of Sigil packaged for Raspbian is v1.4.3, (the newest is 2.0.1) so you may have your work cut out for you. Will you be using Raspbian on your Pi? Or perhaps Debian or Arch? Knowing that will probably go a long way toward being able to help. EDIT: Never mind, you said Ubuntu. The latest Ubuntu for Pi will probably have binary packages for Sigil in their repos. Much more recent than 0.9.9 most likely, but still....

Perhaps things might be better on the Pi 5, but I never had the patience to try and use Sigil on a Pi4B+. Much, much too slow to be usable for me. And as Kevin already mentioned, I'm not certain an older version of QtWebKit is even doable on the Pi.

[Justin_Thought]

Originally Posted by KevinH

You do know about newer Sigil's External XEditor Preferences and Sigil's companion program PageEdit, right? PageEdit is easily launched from within Sigil and does much of the wysiwyg editing that the older BookView enabled.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

v0.9.9 is truly ancient
/snip!/
Even the oldest version of Sigil packaged for Raspbian is v1.4.3,

Thank you both for your quick responses. The overall theme I'm getting is that I'm asking for the moon. Probably would be better to smackdown my stubborn streak and just go with the latest version, see if I find PageEdit accomplishes what I want; if not, I can always just do my editing on my Windows machines.

Amazon is promising delivery "any day now," but since it's an international shipment, I'm at the mercy of those bureaucrats who like to look at things before they allow this demonic technology into the country.

Give me a couple of days until it's actually in my hands, and if I have any problems with the installation, I may be back yelling "Hayyy-elp!"

With total respect for all you guys do to bring great epub editing to the public, many thanks!

[DiapDealer]

For the record, it looks like the QtWebkit for Ubuntu arm64 is going to be v5.212.0~alpha4. That's pretty much what all distros are using. We had nothing but trouble with the 5.12.0 branch which is why we made the jump to QtWebEngine.

It might still be possible to build an earlier version of QtWebKit manually, but it's likely to be complicated. You'd probably need to build a custom version of Qt5 entirely from scratch.