Monday, 29 April 2013

Connecting a kindle to a linux machine

I have a 50mb pdf that I want to read on my kindle.  I cannot use the email to whispersync bridge that amazon provide as the 50mb attachment is too large.

I tried to connect the kindle to my linux laptop and apart from the kindle charging there was no recognition in KDE that I had plugged a device in.  A quick google later discovered that the kindle uses the MTP protocol rather than Mass Storage Device Class protocol like most other USB devices.  Installing MTP support is easy:

sudo apt-get install mtpfs

Plugging in the kindle now gets KDE all excited and allows me to view the content.

Except after unmounting the kindle I couldn't see the PDF on the menu screen.  I re-attached my kindle to the computer and could see the file still there, so why didn't the kindle like it.  The file I copied was called:

10_PRINT_121114.pdf

After renaming it to:

Print Code.pdf

It started to show on the kindle screen.  All I can think of is that the kindle doesn't like files that either start with a numeric or have a '_' character in their names.  After some more renaming I can conclude:
The kindle doesn't like underscore characters in file names.  I ended up just changing the "_" to a " " and everything works fine now.

For those interested the book I am copying to the kindle is called:

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

From 10print.org.  This book tells the story of computer code in society and culture through the lens of a single line of C64 basic code.


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