View PDF - can't get it to skip "Open with" dialog

chraab
Hi everyone,
I'm using Zotero 5.0.88 on Linux Mint 17.3. No matter which command I configure in the settings to open PDFs, Zotero always shows me the "open with" dialogue. Opening papers is my main use of the software, so this is very annoying. Maybe someone knows what's wrong? (Else I'll of course file a bug report, no problem.)
Cheers!
  • dstillman
    edited July 2, 2020
    Posting here is filing a bug report, but in this case it's likely just this:

    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/file_handling_issues

    If you can't resolve this by deleting mimeTypes.rdf, we'd want to see a Debug ID for an attempt to open a file.
  • chraab
    edited July 3, 2020
    It was a different issue (don't actually have mimeTypes.rdf), but I figured it out:

    I had installed Zotero via flatpak. I don't normally use this, and much prefer my regular system package manager, but for Zotero it was the only one available. Now this apparently involves a great deal sandboxing, which makes sense since a flatpak doesn't come from a trusted, vetted source like your Linux distribution's repository. But as a side effect this sandboxing must have been preventing it from directly opening the PDF. The file selector from within Zotero for instance doesn't actually see the regular binaries in /usr/bin/.

    Sadly the website doesn't provide a package either, just a tarball without any automatic updates. I ran Zotero from there, and viewing PDFs works as expected. For the moment that's the lesser of two evils. I believe in principle the flatpak could be fixed, since the sandboxing is configurable: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html
  • darckense
    I have exactly the same issue, and I was not able to fix it by changing the sandbox permissions. (Zotero 5.0.94 On Linux Debian).
    Does someone know how to fix this ?
    Thanks
  • dstillman
    edited January 27, 2021
    I had installed Zotero via flatpak. I don't normally use this, and much prefer my regular system package manager, but for Zotero it was the only one available.
    Note that you should be able to use the zotero-deb packages on any Debian-based system. Those are just lightweight, non-sandboxed packages of the official tarball done by a trusted community member. We can only provide support for the tarball and those. We can't provide any support for a Flatpak or other third-party package.
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