I quite like the Kobo application on Android, so was disappointed to see that there isn’t a Linux client. Until I found there soon will be!

You can download the pre-release Ubuntu binary from here.

I’ve got it working on Fedora14 by roughly using these instructions.

Essentially you extract the .deb file into /opt/kobodesktop and create a shell script to set the environment variables to point to the statically-linked Qt/OpenSSL libs, and a desktop launcher file to run that from your Applications->Office menu.

/opt/kobodesktop/kobo.sh

#!/bin/sh

QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/opt/kobodesktop/usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.6.2/plugins 

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/kobodesktop/usr/lib:/opt/kobodesktop/usr/local/Kobo:/opt/kobodesktop/usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.6.2/lib 

/opt/kobodesktop/usr/local/Kobo/Kobo

/opt/kobodesktop/kobo.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Kobo Desktop eReader
Exec=/opt/kobodesktop/kobo.sh
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/opt/kobodesktop/usr/local/Kobo/Kobo.png
Categories=Office;

Apparently you can run the Amazon Kindle for PC app under WINE (instructions) but that’s no solution to me, and the ebook reader that comes with Calibre I don’t really like and FBReader is pretty basic too, so this is quite useful – you can even browse the Kobo store and sync with your Android.

Update: Calibre is now at version 0.7.52