Home > Ebooks, Linux > No, Kindle Previewer, you may not auto update

No, Kindle Previewer, you may not auto update

January 17th, 2012 Paul Flo Williams

Kindle Previewer is a great time saver for checking formatting, and I’m very pleased that it runs under Wine, as I’m currently running Fedora 16 (Verne).

However, this morning when I ran it, it auto-updated to the latest version, and that crashes. Auto updating is bad enough when you know you have a set of software that works exactly as you like, but updating to a version that won’t run is just bloody rude.

I bet that there’s a cute SELinux trick that could be used to stop Kindle Previewer having network access, but a simple stop-gap is to reinstall the old version, go to the directory where you installed it, and prevent autoupdate.jar from being used. In my case, that’s these two lines:

 $ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/kindle\ previewer
 $ chmod 0 autoupdate.jar

Kindle Previewer now moans that it can’t access that jar file when it runs (duh), but pressing “OK” allows the rest of it to run just fine. I’ll investigate more when I decide I want to see how things look on the Kindle Fire, and that’s not going to be until they’re available in the UK.

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  1. yoink
    January 21st, 2012 at 13:07 | #1

    Hi,

    Try this instead:

    [code]
    chmod 777 autoupdate.jar # to stop the error message if you've already run with chmod 0
    touch update.jar_tmp # if it doesn't already exist
    chmod 0 update.jar_tmp # to stop it downloading to this file
    [/code]

    You get no error message then. HTH.

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