Zotero fails to launch

chipmonk · April 28, 2007

Hello all,

I just installed an update to zotero, and after that, when I start Firefox I get an error message, I close the message, Firefox loads, but the zotero icon has a ! sign over and does not work with the message "There was an error starting Zotero" showing up when I try to use it.

Help please... Thanks.

frankbai · April 28, 2007

i have met the same problem.
Please give me a help Thanks

dstillman · April 28, 2007

There was a problem with non-English locales in 1.0.0b4.r3. Please grab the latest version from the home page and install that over your current version. Let me know if that works.

Thanks.

heisthere · April 28, 2007

it worked for me thanks,
this problem was kind of a shock to me as i'm in the middle of my masterthesis and rely on zotero for it.
thanks for the quick helping.

frankbai · April 28, 2007

Yes I am in China. Now It works well.
Thank you Dan Stillman.
Good job.
I can enjoy the zotero continually.

chipmonk · April 29, 2007

Thanks Dan. It's now working for me too!

mt · July 25, 2007

I installed 1.0.0b4.r5 (the latest from the zotero homepage) with Firefox 1.0.0.5 on Fedora 7. Zotero works well if I start firefox as root. But when I start firefox as a normal user, I get the error "There was an error starting zotero".

The zotero directory is not created in the firefox profiles directory. Is this a permissions error on the file system? If so, what files or directories are affected and how should the permissions on them be set up?

Thanks for any quick help.

mt · July 25, 2007

This is fixed now. It was a problem with one of the many installed extensions for the ordinary user's profile. A newly-created profile worked perfectly.

Unfortunately, I deleted several of the extensions in one go, so can't say which one in particular was the culprit. Sorry.

MT

dstillman · July 25, 2007

It could also just be the permissions on the newly created profile folder... The profile folder needs to be readable, writable, and executable (i.e. 7 in chmod) for the user running Firefox for the Zotero data directory (and directories for a number of other extensions) to be created.