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I have installed Zotero-snap in Ubuntu 20.04.

When I try to update Zotero, or when I try to browse to change the default PDF viewer in Zotero, I get a permission denied error. Check this image:

enter image description here

The permissions of some important directories is shown below:

Permissions

I have even turned on the permission to read and write on removable storage devices for the app as shown below:

Permissions from store

Trying to run Zotero with sudo gives me the following error:

enter image description here

What am I missing? What should I do to resolve this issue?

Shihab Khan
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    The Snap package should disable updating from within the app -- as per its documentation, in-app update isn't supported (see https://snapcraft.io/zotero-snap) and handle updates itself. Given the fact that it's also not up to date with Zotero, I'd recommend using the deb/aptitude package here: https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb/ , which is very reliable. – adam.smith Oct 12 '20 at 18:58
  • @adam.smith, I went for the unofficial debian. It works flawlessly. Thanks for sharing. – Shihab Khan Oct 26 '20 at 06:54
  • @adam.smith please post your comment as an answer, as it also solved the issue for me – Fee May 07 '21 at 13:23
  • @GevaertJoep -- thanks! See below – adam.smith May 07 '21 at 17:21

2 Answers2

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Posting my above comment as an answer as apparently, this comes up for others, too:

The Snap package should disable updating from within the app -- as per its documentation, in-app update isn't supported (see snapcraft.io/zotero-snap) and handle updates itself. Given that it's also not up to date with Zotero, I'd recommend using the deb/aptitude package here, which is very reliable.

Alternatively, you can directly download the tarball from Zotero, unpack it to a convenient location such as ~/.local/bin (make sure you have write access to the location with your regular user account -- otherwise, you'll run into the same issue again) and just run Zotero from the terminal.

Since the deb package basically does the same thing and handles dependencies and creates the launcher, I'd go for that in almost all cases.

adam.smith
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  • If your zotero is inside `~/.local/bin` you can symlink the `zotero.desktop` file inside that folder like `ln -s ~/.local/bin/zotero/zotero.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/zotero.desktop`. That way it won't have to be opened with the terminal and it will show up in the dash. – prab4th Aug 17 '22 at 20:21
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In my case kubuntu 22.04 there was a lock in /usr/lib/zotero

Try this:

sudo chmod 770 /usr/bin/zotero or sudo chmod -R 770 /opt/zotero

or both:

sudo chmod 770 /usr/bin/zotero && sudo chmod -R 770 /opt/zotero

I had to reboot.

In case of a personal machine you can give broader permission using 707 instead of 770.

See the source and comments here.

See explanation of chmod 770 here

Ultimately you can get the latest .deb file from:

https://mirror.mwt.me/zotero/deb/

Path for the .deb:
From official zotero page https://www.zotero.org/support/installation -->
Recommended community maintained https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb -->
Mirror https://mirror.mwt.me/zotero/deb/

Yuri Gelsleichter
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