Introduction

BookSmart is a bookmaking application developed by Blurb, Inc. It allows users to design and publish books.

Although Blurb do not offer or support a Linux version of BookSmart, it is a Java application which will run on Linux with a bit of fiddling.

Website: http://www.blurb.com/

Installation Instructions

These instructions are heavily based on the hard work done by Blurb forum member Cedric Lecuret. His original instructions are here.

Download and mount install disc

Firstly, download the latest version of BookSmart from here. Make sure you get the Mac version, not the Windows version. Alternatively, download it from the command line. The following will get v3.0.3, (newest pr. april 2011) which may not be the latest version so check first:

wget http://downloads.blurb.com/booksmart/BookSmart_3.0.3.dmg

Now install some software to convert the DMG file into something that Linux can mount, such as dmg2img. Follow these DMG2IMG instructions. Then, convert the file using:

dmg2img BookSmart_3.0.3.dmg

Next mount the disc image (Karmic seems to have HFS module loaded by default. If not, "sudo modprobe hfsplus"):

sudo mkdir /macbooksmart
sudo mount -t hfsplus -o loop BookSmart_3.0.3.img /macbooksmart

Install files

Install the BookSmart files in a folder where you have right to write :

mkdir ~/booksmart/
sudo cp -r /macbooksmart/BookSmart.app/Contents/Resources/Java/lib/ ~/booksmart/
sudo cp -r /macbooksmart/BookSmart.app/Contents/Resources/Java/resources/ ~/booksmart/ 
sudo cp /macbooksmart/BookSmart.app/Contents/Resources/booksmart.icns ~/booksmart/

The 3.0.3 Mac version of BookSmart seems to run okay under Java 1.6 - previous versions needed 1.5. Make sure 1.6 is installed:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

Create startup script

Create a script that can start BookSmart:

echo '#! /bin/sh
cd ~/booksmart
classpath=""

# Build classpath with all jars in the lib directory
for jar in lib/*.jar
do
classpath=$classpath:$jar
done

java -Xincgc -ea -Xms256m -Xmx1024m -classpath $classpath com.blurb.booksmart.application.BookSmart

exit $?
' > ~/booksmart/booksmart.sh
sudo chmod a+x ~/booksmart/booksmart.sh

Set up menu

Finally, create a menu item to run BookSmart. Right-click on the Applications menu and select Edit Menus. Add a new entry under the Graphics menu called BookSmart which runs the following command:

~/booksmart/booksmart.sh

You can set the icon to use the following file:

~/booksmart/booksmart.icns

Tidying up

You can now tidy up the files used during installation:

sudo umount /macbooksmart
sudo rmdir /macbooksmart
rm BookSmart_3.0.3.*

Getting Started With BookSmart

You can now run BookSmart by selecting Applications > Graphics > BookSmart from the menu.

<< I can assert that this method works equally good on Mint 12, sep 2012 GijsH >>

Known Issues

None

Additional Notes

This procedure worked fine with BookSmart 3.4.4_de and Ubuntu 13.10 (32bit). There was no need to install Sun Java 1.6, so just skip this step. The HFS module was loaded by default in Ubuntu 13.10. (this note added by dl1dby)

November 2013 (Peter Brewer) - Attempts to run v3.4.4 with OpenJDK-7 failed for me because BookSmart appears to be using a deprecated Java 6 class. Running with OpenJDK-6 worked fine though.


CategoryGraphicsApplications

BookSmart (last edited 2013-11-30 22:51:22 by c-69-136-118-250)