Automatic upgrade does not work on Ubuntu

Hi all!

I am running Ubuntu 18.04 on DELL XPS 13, and I installed Zotero for some times ago. Zotero works fine, and it is a great tool to manage bibliographic data.

The problem is that the automatic upgrading does not work.

There is a message telling that I don't have any privileges to write in Zotero folder.

This is strange, because I created the folder and installed Zotero by myself.

So, what shoul I do, to make the automatic upgrading to work?

  • Where did you install Zotero? Is it in your home folder or in /opt? Do you only have one installation?
  • If you installed it using sudo, you may have done it yourself, but the files will likely be root-owned. How did you install Zotero?
  • I just followed the instructions on Zotero home site:

    "For Ubuntu, the tarball includes a .desktop file that can be used to add Zotero to the launcher. Move the extracted directory to a location of your choice (e.g., /opt/zotero), run the set_launcher_icon script to update the .desktop file for that location, and symlink zotero.desktop into ~/.local/share/applications/ (e.g., ln -s /opt/zotero/zotero.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/zotero.desktop). Zotero should then appear in your launcher. "

    My Zotero folders are in two locations: /opt/Zotero and /home/Zotero. There are more files in home folder (2,5 G), so probably it is the working folder.
  • Zotero folders, plural? That's not how I know it. /opt is not usually user-writable, so you may have used sudo to get it there. If it's just for your own use, you can just unpack zotero in your home dir (and you could remove the one in /opt). There are also deb packages if you don't want to manage this by hand, but they're 3rd party packages. They bundle the official binaries, but the debs themselves are not maintained by the zotero team.
  • Oh wait, wrt the plural: the zotero directory in your home dir is your zotero data, the one in opt is just the zotero program. That makes sense.
  • So you need root privilege to update
  • edited May 25, 2019
    yeah, I'd recommend against running zotero from /opt unless you need it to work for multiple users on that computer.

    The easiest option for a single-user linux computer is to run Zotero somewhere from home (e.g. ~/home/.local/opt/zotero , but it really doesn't matter), in which case updating will work.

    If you do want to keep it in /opt, I'd very much use a package like https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb so aptitude handles the update (and you run those as su anyway).

    edit: sorry, I missed that emiliano says basically the same thing above. Doesn't make it less true.
  • edited May 25, 2019
    I've never seen this error, although I have the program files for Jurism (which works the same as Zotero for this) under /opt. I was curious, so I just checked, and the /opt folder on my system is owned by root:root, but the program files (in /opt/Jurism_linux-x86_64) are owned by my user account.

    To be clear, the files under /opt are program files, and the files under /home/ are data files. The update needs to overwrite files in the former location, it doesn't touch the latter. If you once change the ownership of the program files to your user account (in my case that would be with sudo chown -r <username>:<groupname> /opt/Jurism_linux-x86_64), updates should work fine in future.
Sign In or Register to comment.