Kindle for PC

[TheMooch]

For you Kindle owners out there they released the KindleforPC program today. As expected it's only Windows and (soon) Mac, BUT it WILL run on Linux under Wine with only a couple of oddities. (Such as not being able to see the text on dropdown menus and title bars. If you click into a book it'll load for reading, you just can't see any of the menuing.

[GallComp]

he he he.. Just downloaded it.. Looks nice, and it did transfer all my books...

[TheMooch]

Let me know if you figure out the menu text issue.

[lmgutie]

I just installed KindleForPC on top of Fedora 12 x86_64 and Wine i686 1.1.38
Installation is completed, but the software can't be launched.
No console messages.

WineHQ shows KindleForPC on Fedora as garbage:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...sion&iId=18344

Any clue why it fails?

[droidhacker]

Probably because it is a windoze program.
Wine really doesn't work.
The odd thing might sort-of work, a bit, but in general, it is really not good.

[lmgutie]

Maybe I was unclear with my concern.
So here it goes again:

Any clue why it works on openSUSE and Ubuntu, ...but it fails on Fedora?

[lmgutie]

Just to let you know that Kindle for PC now works on Fedora.
I don't know what upgrade made this possible as I haven't checked regularly.
Currently I am running the following configuration:

Fedora 14, 64 bit
Linux 2.6.35.10-74
GNOME 2.32
Wine 1.3.10-1
Kindle for PC 1.4.0

Luis

[smr54]

Despite the age of this one, and the fact that Amazon now has a web app for it, that works well, thought I'd add my experiences.

Out of the box, wine doesn't work with the newest kindle on Fedora 17. Doing some googling gave me a working solution, grabbing it from an Ubuntu forum thread.


WARNING!!! WARNING!!!

Note that I have no idea what this might break. I don't really use wine, and just used this for the Kindle, but I suspect it would break other things.

Once you've set up wine, it creates a .wine directory in your home directory. In there you will have, among other things, drive_c/windows/winsxs. That directory has several directories in it, containing dlls among other things. Removing all those directories, that is, rm -rf ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/* allowed me to install and run Kindle. I suspect it must break some other things, but on the machine I used for testing, I don't use wine for anything else.

[smr54]

As an addition to this, if anyone is trying to use the kindle in Linux...my guess is that the reason the above, drastic step worked is because only one of many of the dll's in the winsxs directory was a problem. If I have time and inclination, I'll try it only renaming one at a time to see which one is the culprit. (This is more important for those who make a lot of use of wine, and can't have it break.)

I will reiterate that as the cloud reader is not horrible there wasn't much reason to do this--it was more because it became a bit of a challenge.

I will also mention, while on the subject, that in my googling about this, it seems that one cannot remove azw DWM on a Kindle app for PC running in Wine. Ironically, it seems that to do it, (this is untested by me, and as it is probably illegal, at least in the US, I don't recommend that the reader test it either, it just strikes me as funny), one requires an actual Windows or Mac. (Or one running in VirtualBox.)

There's something ironic about that, that one requires a proprietary system to break proprietary things. Another thing that I found amusing, though I can really understand it, is that there seem to be many who will buy an ebook, then promptly get a pirated copy, as the pirated one can easily be read on all platforms. I wasn't googling for ways to do either, just the same themes kept coming up in the hits I was getting for running kindle on wine. Kindle and wine without other keywords, by the way, seem to bring up dating sites.