Kobo Glo firmware 2.8.1 and kobohack-j
[For update blog entries see this blog entry for an update for firmware 2.10, and this one for 3.1.1].
I recently reported about how to upgrade the Kobo Glo. One of the items was installing optimized libraries compiled from the kobohack-j project.
Kobo has released a new version of the firmware, 2.8.1 (see this MobileRead thread, direct download link). It contains various changes (see mentioned thread), but one thing that I liked is that it feels more snappy, quicker. And that page navigation in menus and lists is now done with swipes instead of using the slider.
I also have updated the KoboRoot.tgz with the latest release of kobohack-j, that is kobohack-j-130713.zip, and everything works as expected by now.
So, go forth and enjoy reading (my current reading list: Harry Potter II in Japanese, Ransmayr – Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes, Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicon, Kobo Abe – The face of another)
Hey man, sorry to bother you, but I’ve got an English Kobo Glo. Was wondering if you knew anything about getting Japanese firmware onto this thing, as Japanese character support on the English firmware is extremely poor.
Hmm, I don’t think there are any differences in the firmware. I always download the ones from the main servers, and they have all the Japanese support that is needed.
What is it in particular that you consider “extremely poor”?
Well so far, I’ve been able to fix most of the issues, though it hasn’t always been easy. The biggest annoyance is that the sleep screen, and cover view in my library do not display Japanese characters at all, but instead gives me the ol’ XP era, ugly, empty boxes, which just looks awful.
Another minor annoyance is having to swipe the wrong way to move backwards and forwards in Japanese language books. Although I imagine if I were to fix this, I’d probably end up making it so that I had to swipe the wrong way in English language texts instead . Though maybe not.
One more thing, which firmware version are you running? I am running the latest (3.1.1) and don’t see any of your problems.
Concerning the first problem with the sleep screen, that is strange. I can only assume you have a book requiring a non-standard font. My Harry Potter and other Japanese books show proper Kanji on the sleep screen.
For the “wrong way to move backward” – what do you mean? You are aware that many Japanese books are read from right to left. Or do you say that you have a right-to-left book, but have to tap on the *right* side to go to the next page and the left side to go to the previous page?
When reading Japanese book the touching regions are inverted, that is normal, and correct, because the expected behaviour for Japanese books.
I don’t think the font is non-Standard. However to even get the text to display at all, I had to manually install Gothic because the Kobo did not come with any Japanese fonts installed. Even after installing Gothic, I still had to manually change to font in order to have the characters display. For the wrong swiping, yes, I mean I have to press the right side of the screen to go to the next page, and left side of the screen to go to the previous page, even when reading a Japanese (i.e., right to left) text.
Can you send me by email one of the problematic books?
The firmware I’m using is 3.1.1