Chromebook Linux (Beta) and Zotero Tarball - Help!

Laughters · February 17, 2019

I'm a major novice on Chromebook and Linux so if someone has step by step, I will love you forever! I downloaded the Zotero standalone linux tarball. Now what commands do I execute and where? Do I do it from Linux terminal or Crosh?

adamsmith · February 17, 2019

I think getting this installed from the tarball might not work on Chromebooks. But as I understand it, you should be able to keep the .deb:
https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb/releases under "Assets" has a .deb that's kept up to date.

Laughters · February 24, 2019

Thank you for the suggestion. I tried following the instructions on the link but still not working.

emilianoeheyns · February 24, 2019

I think for chromebooks you can't use PPAs, you just download the .debs and install them.

MFSchar · March 19, 2019

I have struggled with this same issue for months and then finally found a path that is easy and seems to work in Chrome OS. Maybe this can help others.

Make sure you are running ChromeOS v72 or later and enable Linux Apps for Chromebook in the Settings. Look for the Linux version of Zotero as a .deb file (Zotero provides it as a tarball download not .deb so you will have to look elsewhere) The link above is where I found it ... https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb/releases. Locate the .deb file under the "Assets" section. I found that the amd64 versions worked on a chromebook while the i386 versions would not load. Here's the cool part ... click on the file you want to download and then download it into the Files app in the folder "my files>linux files" Once downloaded, click on the file and it will install it in your Linux App folder with a launch icon. Click on the launch icon and set-up syncing.

Also, you may want to change the default PDF viewer which is set to LibreDocs and is not useful. I'd recommend Evince which is open-source and quite functional. You can set it as the default in Preferences>General>Open PDFs>Custom and on your computer search in usr/bin and select the Evince executable file.

I hope this helps. It got me over the hump. I wish Zotero would offer a .deb version. Thank you @emilianoeheyns!

emilianoeheyns · March 19, 2019

I'm in the process of fully automating the .deb creation (it currently is mostly automated) and I hope it will be adopted by Zotero if it passes their quality standards, if not, I will maintain these .debs indefinitely.