Calibre won't start after update to 7.17

[nerdyreader]

Last night, I updated Calibre to version 7.17 and after that, it's refusing to open.

I am running Fedora 39 (Linux) and all my packages are up to date (I just updated them as well).

When I try to start Calibre from the terminal, I get this message:

$ calibre
qt.gui.imageio: libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile

It also briefly flashes the Calibre opening graphic in the GUI. After that, if I go to the hot corner, I can see the Calibre icon sort of floating there but it never opens.

I also tried

$ calibre --ignore-plugins

This gets rid of the libpng warning but Calibre still doesn't start.

It's been a wonderful piece of software before this though!

Thanks for any help. Happy to provide any additional data if you can specify.

[kovidgoyal]

Are you using the official calibre binaries or the fedora package of calibre?

[DNSB]

At a wild eyed guess, I would say he is running the official calibre binaries. My Fedora 39 VM shows 7.13 as the latest calibre version in the repository. Perhaps the QT 6.7.2 and video driver battle continues on their computer?

Edit: I should mention that this was a first install of calibre on the Fedora 39 VM and I needed to install libdeflate ( libdeflate-1.21-2.fc39.x86_64) to allow calibre to finish starting up.

Edit 2: Corrected typo in version number.

[kovidgoyal]

Yes currently the Wayland ecosystem is totally broken again for people with some compositors and nvidia cards because of something called explicit sync. @nerdyreader: What compositor are you using and what video card?

[DNSB]

On my Fedora 39 VM, running inxi -Gxx | grep compositor gives me:

compositor: gnome-shell v: 45.9 driver: dri: vmwgfx gpu: vmwgfx

[johnnydo]

cant read epubs after update 7.17

Just says preparing book for first read .....

windows 10 not had a problem before any ideas before i roll back ?


J

[johnnydo]

Rolled back all ok v7.17 is broken...

[theducks]

Originally Posted by johnnydo

Rolled back all ok v7.17 is broken...

Not quite
I have 2 W10 machines. 1 does what yours does, the other works just fine.
I suspect graphics driver issues. The prob is none have been made for my fanless Radeon card for years.

[johnnydo]

a graphics card stopping a book reader working would be a first... cant see anyone dashing out for a new gfx card to use calibre.. better to fix the program..

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by johnnydo

a graphics card stopping a book reader working would be a first... cant see anyone dashing out for a new gfx card to use calibre.. better to fix the program..

If you followed the multiple discussions in this and other forums, the issues are mainly with QT which is used for managing graphics on programs used on multiple platforms. Sometimes, the QT programmers will fix bugs in a later point release, other times, they release a new major version which causes issues for more older video cards.

And sadly, this is not a first. Two ePub renderers I use have been broken by new versions with updated QT versions. Some can be fixed by environmental variables settings to disable using the GPU for instance while others have required major effort to program around QT's "improvements".

For one example, my older laptop has dual Intel and NVidia video. So far the Intel video has not broken but the NVidia video has twice required a driver update. Adding a couple of Windows environmental variables has seemed to kept that from happening in the last few updates. I'm not actually certain if the first three items still work to force using opengl and the fourth to disable hardware acceleration.

"QT3D_RENDERER", "opengl"
"QSG_RHI_BACKEND", "opengl"
"QT_OPENGL", "software"
"QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS", "--disable-gpu"

[nerdyreader]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Are you using the official calibre binaries or the fedora package of calibre?

Yes, the official Calibre binaries.

@nerdyreader: What compositor are you using and what video card?

compositor: gnome-shell v: 45.9 driver: gpu: i915 display-ID: 0

I don't have a separate graphics card, just the built-in graphics on an Intel cpu. I am running Wayland.

Thank you for your help.

[nerdyreader]

More info that might help narrow it down:

1. I initially only updated Calibre from 7.16 to 7.17. Even without updating anything else, 7.17 would not open.
2. Then I updated other packages but that didn't help.
3. Now I have re-installed 7.16 and it works fine.

My guess is that it's not QT because the older Calibre 7.16 works fine with updated everything, while the newer 7.17 doesn't work either before or after other things were updated.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

If you followed the multiple discussions in this and other forums, the issues are mainly with QT which is used for managing graphics on programs used on multiple platforms. Sometimes, the QT programmers will fix bugs in a later point release, other times, they release a new major version which causes issues for more older video cards.

And sadly, this is not a first. Two ePub renderers I use have been broken by new versions with updated QT versions. Some can be fixed by environmental variables settings to disable using the GPU for instance while others have required major effort to program around QT's "improvements".

For one example, my older laptop has dual Intel and NVidia video. So far the Intel video has not broken but the NVidia video has twice required a driver update. Adding a couple of Windows environmental variables has seemed to kept that from happening in the last few updates. I'm not actually certain if the first three items still work to force using opengl and the fourth to disable hardware acceleration.

"QT3D_RENDERER", "opengl"
"QSG_RHI_BACKEND", "opengl"
"QT_OPENGL", "software"
"QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS", "--disable-gpu"

I believe QT was updated for 7.17 to fix a problem someone was having with calibre on a Mac. Now it's causing more problems it seems.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by nerdyreader

compositor: gnome-shell v: 45.9 driver: gpu: i915 display-ID: 0

I don't have a separate graphics card, just the built-in graphics on an Intel cpu. I am running Wayland.

That may be a good chunk of your problems there. Wayland seems to be the cause of many issues for calibre and Linux. I did a snapshot of my Fedora 39 VM and updated to Fedora 40 where Wayland is the default and almost immediately noticed some display oddities when using the viewer (page forward/backward, half the screen is written then the rest gets written after a couple of seconds).

I tried the 'sudo echo "export GSK_RENDERER=gl" > /etc/profile.d/gtk_renderer.sh' command and it added an option in the bottom of the login screen to select some video options. Selecting Plasma with X11 ran the viewer without issue.

[nerdyreader]

Originally Posted by DNSB

That may be a good chunk of your problems there. Wayland seems to be the cause of many issues for calibre and Linux.

Reasonable, except that I've been using Wayland almost as long as I've been using Calibre, and have never had problems with it before. If I have time, I might try switching to Xorg to see if 7.17 will work with that.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I believe QT was updated for 7.17 to fix a problem someone was having with calibre on a Mac. Now it's causing more problems it seems.

Do you mean that the QT version used by Calibre changed between 7.16 and 7.17?