How to get Zotero to launch reliably in Ubuntu

donblanco

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 - also using KDE instead of Gnome, but I don't think that should matter.

Followed all instructions, got Zotero running and used it for a few days. However it wasn't in the Software launcher and it stopped launching eventually. Even after symlinking (or copying) the zotero.desktop icon to ~/.local/share/applications/ it didn't work. It showed up in the KDE application launcher, but would never load. No other way of pinning things to my main panel worked. After trying many different ways of doing this, here is what works:

1 - after unpacking the tarball into /home//Zotero_linux-x86_64/ you go to that directory (in your file manager) and find the zotero.desktop file
2 - drag and drop that file onto your icon panel or where-ever you keep your desktop icons for launching programs. In my case this is the main panel at the bottom of the screen
3 - click that icon. It should just launch.

jan.riha

I also had a problem with symlinking in Kubuntu 18.04. The file in ~/.local/share/applications was created empty. Linking (Ctrl+Shift) directly from the parent directory made it possible to launch the programme. To enable launching also from the launcher, you may try this:

sudo ln -sf .../Zotero/zotero.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/zotero.desktop

It has worked for me (before executing the command, do not forget to modify the path).

The file in the applications folder should read as follows:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Zotero
Exec=bash -c "$(dirname $(readlink -f %k))/zotero -url %U"
Icon=.../Zotero/chrome/icons/default/default256.png
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Office;
MimeType=text/plain

emilianoeheyns

https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-jurism-ppa has both Ubuntu packages and a script that will install zotero, create desktop links, and make it so zotero://select links will work. The packages literally just run that installer script, so the end result is the same either way.