Kindle on Ubuntu

I recently splashed out on a Kindle. I was in two minds but immediately upon its arrival and thereafter, I have been pleasantly surprised. Mostly by it, essentially, just working.

I bought what would have otherwise been a large book (with C++ code listings), thinking it would be nice and easy to search -- and it is. Unfortunately, the code listings wrap so that distinct lines are hard to distiguish, even with the font set to its smallest. To work around this I wanted to view the same book on my PC in the hope that it could be formatted in a nicer fashion.

The Kindle application doesn't support Linux but luckily it isn't too hard to set up under Wine...

Pull the lastest version of Wine (1.3.25 at time of writing) from the Wine Ubuntu PPA:

• Open Synaptic Package Manager
• Settings → Repositories → Other Software
• Click Add...
• Enter APT Line: ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
• Select wine-1.3 from the package list and mark for installation
• Install Wine 1.3

Download the Kindle application for Windows. Open the installer in Wine from the terminal to see if there are errors:

• Run: wine ~/Downloads/KindleForPC-installer.exe

If that goes well you should have the menu item:

• Applications → Wine → Programs → Amazon → Amazon Kindle → Kindle

That's it.