I’m a Linux newbie and recently switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3. A lot of things are easy to understand, understandable and work perfectly.
But I can’t solve one problem and am hoping for detailed instructions, including at the command level.
I want to install Calibre and dedrm/nodrm and get them running. I’ve tried all sorts of tips from the internet, but the epub and pdf files keep their drm.
For example, reddit says you need wine winetricks samba and lib32-gnutls. If you follow this advice, lib32-gnutls is already included when you install wine etc. Or wine is 64-bit, but you need 32-bit.
Sure, the information on reddit is older, but no matter what, I can’t get it to work.
Who can help me?
Please give me everything that is necessary at the command level etc.
Your message is a little bit confusing and not sure what the actual problem is:
You are unable to install dedrm plugin
or you have installed it but id does not work as expect.
I assume the first. Here is a short guide how to install DeDRM on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint Linux. I have tested the installation on Debian and there were no problems:
Download the DeDRM plugin. Navigate to DeDRM plugin github page and download a tools zip file: (e.g., DeDRM_tools_7.x.x.zip)
Before you can install it you first must unzip the file.
Locate the: DeDRM_plugin.zip
Open Calibre. Click on Preferences (found at the top bar).
Under the Advanced section, click Plugins.
At the bottom of the plugins window, click Load plugin from file.
Navigate to the downloaded .zip file and select it. not the tools zip but the DeDRM_plugin.zip
Confirm any warnings you may see.
After it is installed, restart Calibre to activate the plugin.
Hi again,
Thanks for your information but this is not my problem.
I tried all this with different versions of calibre and different versions of dedrm plugin. Any combination results in the same: any book with dedrm was not changed, it was not possible to open and read the book with an epub reader.
I read a lot of “solutions” of that problem as I tried to explain above. The point is that downloading calibre (for instance the newest version) and the same for dedrm plugin does not working on my laptop.
Few hints describe additional downloading as I tried to explain.
So I am confused at least what is really necessary to do to get the dedrm problem solved on my laptop having only Linux mint cinnamon 21.3 installed and nothing else.
Hope it is a bit clearer to understand my situation.
So from what I understand, You have installed Calibre and dedrm plugin. When you try to open book you get this message:
“This book has DRM” “This book is locked by DRM. To learn more about DRM and why you cannot read or convert this book in calibre, click here.”
To move forward I need to ask whether you have configured configured the plugin further. You need to provide more details and choose what eBooks you would like to remove DRM. To do that, navigate to plugins, located the installed nodrm plugin and double click on it. From there you need to configure it further.
before Linux I have had windows 10 with calibre and the dedrm plugin. Using a german library together with adobe digital edition I download a book. This book was loaded to calibre and after that I got the picture of the book and without the dedrm immediately. No additional changes inside calibre. The book was readable with adobe digital including dedrm for some days. The output of calibre was always readable in any epub reader. The same handling was with pdf books.
So I was the opinion that the same handling is on Linux calibre. I have no kindle books or others.
I’ve an older laptop but this shouldn’t important. Using linux mint cinnamon 21.3 and the proposed updates, I started with the wine installation. Here it’s important to do the following:
On page winehq webpage use the button “Download”. Choose your “WineHQ Binary Packages”, here it’s Ubuntu.
First do the “Preparation”, then “Add the repository” (my linux wishes jammy), then “Update the package information” before doing the real “Install Wine” with the stable branch.
The best verification of the successful wine installation is for instance to install a simple windows 10 program. I used 7zip. Download the exe-install-program and let it install by wine. A simple click on 7zip exe-install-program starts wine.
After that you should find 7zip in the wine display, abd it should work of course.
Now download windows 10 calibre PORTABLE version 4.23.
Do the installation of calibre using wine.
Download the dedrm 6.8.0.,
and use it as it’s described everywhere to include it in calibre.
The last step is to download the Adobe Digital Edition, installation using wine and use the function to get your computer prepared for that, means you need the ADE key. This is simple, your email adress and a password after registration and it works.
Last but not least add any epub or pdf book to calibe and the drm is off. The book picture will be displayed.
Write your experience right here and let the community know
thanks for sharing… I was wondering, whether you de-installed Wine (which you might have had installed before), before you started the procedure you mention?
I have originally managed to install ADE 4.5 via Wine 9.0, I added the DeDRM/DeACSM extensions into the Calibre 7.23 (which I got directly from Calibre for Linux), and since then I have been trying for 2 days now to find a solution to make the DeDRM work.
I have Linux Linux Mint Debian Based.
I have also tried to download calibre portable version 7.23 via Wine, but this does not work, as the folder with the installation does not appear anywhere in the /.wine-path…
It looks, as I migth need a different version of dedrm (I currently have 10.0.9) and calibre portable, but: what should I do now at this stage? Can I just overwrite Calibre with an older version, and what do I do if Wine does not display the Calibre portable version? That is why I wonder whether I need to reinstall everything again and before that somehow uninstall Wine?
