using the Reader without Connect software

I'm trying to add files (PDF and RTF) to the Sony Reader PRS500 without going through the Connect SW from Sony. User developed utils from mobileread forums.

PRSUtil - tried, but it says

The system cannot execute the specified program.

- Is it because .NET framework needs to be installed? Let me check.

libprs500 - Involved process:

Following the wiki, I've downloaded and installed the other items. Running
L:\Python25\scripts\easy_install libprs500 ran for a while, then stopped with

error: Python was built with Visual Studio 2003;
extensions must be built with a compiler than can generate compatible binaries.
Visual Studio 2003 was not found on this system. If you have Cygwin installed,
you can try compiling with MingW32, by passing "-c mingw32" to setup.py.

So I tried downloading the PyXML-0.8.4 tar.gz manually, went into the directory, ran setup.py install -c

mingw32

No, that's not right, it error: option -c not recognized

Then tried setup.py build -c mingw32

This time it said error: command 'gcc' failed: No such file or directory

So I checked in the mingw32 bin directory (which was installed with QT).

Added L:\MinGW\bin to the PATH by going to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables

RESTARTED the system (or else path is not updated) and then tried

setup.py build -c mingw32

OK, worked.

Then setup.py install - still gave the same error of VS2003 not found. Oh, it's trying to build it again. So,

checked

setup.py --help - install has options --skip-build as well as --no-compile. Aha! Did

setup.py install --skip-build

Worked!

Ran L:\Python25\scripts\easy_install libprs500

This time it gave

error: Couldn't find a setup script in c:\docume~1\sgh\locals~1\temp\easy_install-vvkkzb\pyusb-0.3.5.win32.zip

This is in spite of having already copied the contents of this zip file to the site-packages directory before the install. Probably because this compiled version is for Python2.4.

So,

running prs500 info gave

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "L:\Python25\Scripts\prs500-script.py", line 5, in
from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
File "l:\python25\lib\site-packages\setuptools-0.6c3-py2.5.egg\pkg_resources.py", line 2479, in
File "l:\python25\lib\site-packages\setuptools-0.6c3-py2.5.egg\pkg_resources.py", line 585, in require
File "l:\python25\lib\site-packages\setuptools-0.6c3-py2.5.egg\pkg_resources.py", line 483, in resolve
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: pyusb>=0.3.5

OK, now try to compile pyusb from source. Downloaded from sourceforge pyusb-0.3.5-py25.zip - but this just had the same 80 kB usb.pyd which I already have in site-packages! So, checked the pkg_resources.py mentioned above, the path itself doesn't exist, because the setuptools-0.6c3-py2.5.egg is a binary file, so no wordpad editing possible. So I'm stuck.