Building The Kobo Reader Sources

I’ve covered this before, but the Kobo Reader sources have changed, so here’s an updated guide to installing and building them.

Create the directory structure:

cd
mkdir kobo
cd kobo
mkdir fs
mkdir tmp

Fetch the Kobo Reader sources:

git clone git clone git://github.com/kobolabs/Kobo-Reader.git KoboLabs

Set bash as your shell (you can set it back afterwards using the same command):

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow dash
# Choose "No"

Install the developer tools:

toolchains/gcc-codesourcery-2010q1-202.bin

If you’re on a 64-bit version of the OS, make sure you install the i386 versions of libc6 and any other missing libraries for the installer or the tools (e.g. libXext).

Make symbolic links to the toolchain under the names that Qt’s build system is expecting. Otherwise you will get weird and difficult to diagnose errors:

cd ~/CodeSourcery/Sourcery_G++/bin
for f in arm-none-linux-gnueabi-*; do n=$(echo $f|cut -b 24-); ln -s $f arm-linux-$n; done

Set required environment variables:

echo "export KOBOLABS=$HOME/kobo/KoboLabs" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/CodeSourcery/Sourcery_CodeBench_Lite_for_ARM_GNU_Linux/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Create the file ~/kobo/KoboLabs/build/build-config-user.sh with the following contents:

DEVICEROOT=$HOME/kobo/fs
QT_EXTRA_ARGS="--prefix=$HOME/kobo/qt -DQT_NO_QWS_CURSOR -DQT_NO_QWS_QPF2"

Start the build:

cd ~/kobo/tmp
~/kobo/KoboLabs/build/build-all.sh

And then wait…