How to run GitBook Editor on Linux

Did you ever wanted to write and publish book? With GitBook you can create ebook using markdown syntax and with few clicks publish it in multiple formats such as PDF, EPUB, HTML or MOBI. GitBook also allows to split the workload among multiple contributors by using git distributed revision control. In this article we show how to run GitBook on Fedora and Ubuntu Linux.



First download a precompiled binary files:

$ wget -O gitbook-linux64.tar.gz https://www.gitbook.io/editor/download

Exctract content:

$ tar xvzf gitbook-linux64.tar.gz 
GitBook/
GitBook/GitBook
GitBook/icon.png
GitBook/install.sh
GitBook/libffmpegsumo.so
GitBook/nw.pak
GitBook/start.sh

At the presen time GitBook has issues with loading shared libraries and as a result if you try to start GitBook you will see a following error:

$ GitBook/GitBook
GitBook/GitBook: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Although to deal with this kind of issues, the GitBook comes with GitBook/start.sh file which should fix the above shared library issue and automatically start GitBook. However, it does not appear to be working and to fix our libudev.so.0 problem you may need to run the following linux command:

FEDORA:
# ln -s /usr/lib64/libudev.so.1 /usr/lib64/libudev.so.0
UBUNTU:
# ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0

Now you can start GitBook:

$ GitBook/GitBook

In order to convert book to PDF formant a Calibre pdf convert tool is required. You can install it using yum

FEDORA:
# yum install calibre
UBUNTU:
# apt-get install calibre