Feature request: Allow treating connected folder as specific device

[Joel Goguen]

Using calibre on ChromeOS (in Crostini, just Linux running in a container), devices like Kobo and Kindle devices can't be directly mounted in the container, only shared to it. This only allows calibre to use "Connect To Folder". For most devices this is probably fine, but if a book needs to be converted to the target device format or more than just a simple copy is needed this won't work.

To allow more easily using devices in Crostini on ChromeOS, since it appears mass storage devices will only be shared with the containers and not passed through, can "Connect to Folder" be enhanced to tell calibre to pretend it's a specific other device? For example, I connect to a folder and I can tell calibre it's actually "KoboTouchExtended" (or "Amazon DX", Nook, etc.) and the Folder driver delegates to that driver instead.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Hmm well in theory it is do-able. You'd basically need to add hooks to the kindle and kobo drivers to initialize from an externally supplied path instead of the open() function. And modify the eject functionality similarly. Then add some config to the folder driver to tell it which device to emulate. Then modify all the API endpoints in the folder driver to delegate to the configured device instead.

There will be other problems though, stuff like supported formats, etc are not functions that can be delegated but simple fields, so would probably have to use some magic to make it happen.

A fair bit fo work overall.

[Jes (jjjesss)]

I have more or less the same problems the first user posting this feature. Since a long time ago I use the wonderfull feature "connect to folder" to be able to send books to my Sony PRS-T3 and Kobo Libra 2. But I cannot use Collections feature available with Kobo plugins. I must to say that I have this issue because my computers run FreeBSD and the devices are not detected (or at least not mounted) because of HAL is not available. But the detection could be done by other ways and mounted is possible (I do it with the help of dbsmc utility, but KDE Plasma uses other means).

Both Sony PRS-T3 and Kobo Libra 2 use usb mass storage. So at least for this kind of devices, the feature proposed by Joel would be fantastic.

Anyway, thanks for your wonderful project Calibre and the time you spend improving it.

BR,

Jes