Staf Wagemakers

Hi, I’m staf…

Running kindle on GNU/Linux with wine

less than 1 minute read

desktop

I enjoy reading ebooks during my train trip to work on my nexus 7.

At home I prefer to read on my monitor since this is bigger.

Most of the time I use epub or pdf for reading, I bought a kindle version of a book from amazon assuming that I could read with amazon cloud reader at home.

Unfortunately this books is not compatible with cloud reader.

Proprietary_formats should be avoid, lesson learned (again).

To read my book at home I decided to give the windows version of kindle on wine a try

The installation was pretty straightforward on Fedora 19.

  • Install wine
[root@vicky ~]# yum install wine
Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
  • Download Kindle for Window xp

Download it from: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_ln_ar?docId=1000426311

  • Run the installer
[swagemakers@vicky ~]$ wine ~/Downloads/KindleForPC-installer.exe
  • Create kindle startup script
wine $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Amazon/Kindle/Kindle.exe &

Happy reading

but

It’s better to only read ebooks in an open format

Leave a comment

You may also enjoy

Use a GPG smartcard with Thunderbird. Part 1: setup GnuPG

14 minute read

I use a Free Software Foundation Europe fellowship GPG smartcard for my email encryption and package signing. While FSFE doesn’t provide the smartcard anymore it’s still available at www.floss-shop.de.

gpg smartcard readers

I moved to a Thinkpad w541 with coreboot running Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD so I needed to set up my email encryption on Thunderbird again.

It took me more time to reconfigure it again - as usual - so I decided to take notes this time and create a blog post about it. As this might be useful for somebody else … or me in the future :-)

The setup is executed on Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) with the FSFE fellowship GPG smartcard, but the setup for other Linux distributes, FreeBSD or other smartcards is very similar.

Read more...

Running OpenBSD as an UEFI virtual machine (on a Raspberry Pi)

9 minute read

I started to migrate all the services that I use on my internal network to my Raspberry Pi 4 cluster. I migrated my FreeBSD jails to BastileBSD on a virtual machine running on a Raspberry Pi. See my blog post on how to migrate from ezjail to BastilleBSD. https://stafwag.github.io/blog/blog/2023/09/10/migrate-from-ezjail-to-bastille-part1-introduction-to-bastillebsd/

tianocore

Running FreeBSD as a virtual machine with UEFI on ARM64 came to the point that it just works. I have to use QEMU with u-boot to get FreeBSD up and running on the Raspberry Pi as a virtual machine with older FreeBSD versions: https://stafwag.github.io/blog/blog/2021/03/14/howto_run_freebsd_as_vm_on_pi/.

But with the latest versions of FreeBSD ( not sure when it started to work, but it works on FreeBSD 14) you can run FreeBSD as a virtual machine on ARM64 with UEFI just like on x86 on GNU/Linux with KVM.

UEFI on KVM is in general provided by the open-source tianocore project.

I didn’t find much information on how to run OpenBSD with UEFI on x86 or ARM64.

OpenBSD 7.4

So I decided to write a blog post about it, in the hope that this information might be useful to somebody else. First I tried to download the OpenBSD 7.4 ISO image and boot it as a virtual machine on KVM (x86). But the iso image failed to boot on a virtual with UEFI enabled. It looks like the ISO image only supports a legacy BIOS.

ARM64 doesn’t support a “legacy BIOS”. The ARM64 download page for OpenBSD 7.4 doesn’t even have an ISO image, but there is an install-<version>.img image available. So I tried to boot this image on one of my Raspberry Pi systems and this worked. I had more trouble getting NetBSD working as a virtual machine on the Raspberry Pi but this might be a topic for another blog post :-)

You’ll find my journey with my installation instructions below.

Read more...