Calibre – Fix Calibre Not Working on Ubuntu 20.04

20.04calibre

Calibre stopped working recently. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling.

When I open a terminal and call $calibre I get the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/calibre", line 20, in <module>
    sys.exit(calibre())
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui_launch.py", line 73, in calibre
    main(args)
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py", line 543, in main
    listener = create_listener()
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/main.py", line 514, in create_listener
    return Listener(address=gui_socket_address())
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/utils/ipc/server.py", line 110, in __init__
    self._listener._unlink.cancel()
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'cancel'

Do I need to install some dependency that the sudo apt install didn't get? I tried installing via command line and the software installer/updater GUI.

I'm on version Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS. I made sure that my software in general is up to date also.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, at this moment the version of Calibre that is in the 20.04 repos is version 4.99 which does not work with Python 3. To make 4.99 work you would have to patch a file yourself as shown in the bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/calibre/+bug/1898904 or you could download it from a different repository. Either way, Canonical has not patched 4.99 to work with 20.04 yet in the official repositories.

Also, quoted from Calibre themselves:

Please do not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below.

You can download it from https://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux

You can also run the command from that site to install it (which is actually easier to install with):

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin

I have added the above command to a script called install_calibre so that I can run it anytime to update my calibre version to the newest at any time.

Hope this helps!

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