"error starting zotero" after starting firefox as root (linux)

johnross
Had a perplexing problem recently. I had been using Z successfully for some time. Then in the process of trying to get a debugger to work I started firefox as 'root' instead of 'john' . From then on when I started firefox as 'john' I got the msg that zotero would not start. I poked around and found in the default firefox profile (under home/john/.mozilla/<firefox_generated_name>.default/zotero there was a file called zotero.sqlite-journal which was owned by 'root' and only writeable by 'root' - all the others were owned by 'john'. I changed the permissions on that file to make it writeable by all and guess what? ... My zotero started working again (as 'john') and I had access to my zotero library. Have I found a bug?

ubuntu 8.1
kernel 2.6.27-9-generic
firefox 3.0.10 canonical ubuntu
zotero 2.0b5

John
  • noksagt
    Have I found a bug?
    No. You need read/write permissions for most files in the Zotero data directory for Zotero to function properly. You did not have such permissions, so Zotero did not work.

    You should avoid running firefox & most other userland applications as root.

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