I’m just curious if anyone knows if it’s possible to make Calibre, an e-book manager, run on the drobofs. I currently have Calibre running on a Mac Mini, and all of the books stored on the drobo, but it would be really sweet if Calibre simply ran as a droboapp.
Anyone know if it looks possible and/or if it would even be worth it (I’m not a developer, just a dreamer)? If it could be ported, I’m not sure if it would be able to run quickly enough to be worth it (searching for a book among a large library, I can imagine, would take a while).
I’m not quite sure what you mean when you say “to run as a droboapp.” Is it that you want the app to show up on your browser? Or to somehow have a virtual desktop on the drobo that you can connect to?
As far as I can see Calibre is an app with a graphical user interface. That, right there is a big no-no for droboapps. Theoretically speaking (and really, this is quite inside the realm of speculation) you could run a full fledged virtual graphical unix desktop on the drobo, and connect remotely to it whenever you need. The problem is that it would be so painfully slow that no one in a sane state of mind would use that.
Another possibility is if Calibre has some kind of separation between a so-called “frontend” and a “backend.” In other words, if the graphical app is just connecting to some server that usually runs on the same machine. You could then move the server to the drobo, but you would still need the client app.
Finally, the only realistic way I see to run Calibre as a droboapp is if it would offer some kind of web interface. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I have not seen anything like that on their website.
Now, imagine that Calibre does offer a web interface. Then comes the complicated part, which is cross-compiling this thing. Cross-compiling difficulty is usually directly proportional to the number of dependencies. As it is, Calibre has a pretty damn long list of dependencies, and after a quick glance at them I’m not sure all of them are cross-compile friendly.
Thanks for the reply! You’ve got a good point when you said [quote]As far as I can see Calibre is an app with a graphical user interface. That, right there is a big no-no for droboapps.[/quote] I understand now how my initial idea/question likely would not work or be as easy as I thought.
However, although you did not see it mentioned, it does come with a built in web server and web interface to allow for searching and downloading of books. If you go to the home page -> About Calibre -> Features, you’ll find:
[quote]Content server for online access to your book collection
calibre has a built-in web server that allows you to access your ebook collection using a simple browser from any computer anywhere in the world. It can also email your books and downloaded news to you automatically. It has support for mobile devices, so you can browse your collection and download books from your smartphone, Kindle, etc.[/quote]
I’ll admit, I was mainly hoping for the ability to add/remove books, and the ability to edit their metadata all from the web interface, but that thought/suggestion is not for you fine gentlemen; I’ll save it for the Calibre’s developer forum.
Hate to dig up an old post, but @semibeard did you have any luck with this? Calibre does indeed have an independent web-ui, and @ricardo you’re definitely right it has a ton of dependencies. but im hopeful this could still prove useful as a tool to manage my ebooks which already live on my drobo.
