Zotero 5 for ARM? (Raspberry Pi)

oneyud87
I have been an enthusiastic user of Zotero for years. I am now doing most of my computing on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ which has an ARM processor. Zotero 4 works fine but full support is about to stopped for that version and it will no longer sync from Aug 1. This will make it far less useful for my workflow.
Is Zotero 5 available in an ARM version?
If not, are there any plans to develop one?
Or advice about how to go about doing so myself?
Failing all that, does anyone know of a full Zotero version for the cli? (zotero-cli is good but does not allow editing of entries or adding new ones.)
Many thanks.
  • dstillman
    I assume you're talking about Linux here? And when you say that Zotero 4 works, you just mean that there's a version of Firefox for ARM Linux and you're using the old Firefox extension?

    We have no current plans to create an ARM version, but after the switch to Electron next year it should be possible for someone set up cross-compilation for ARM Linux.
  • oneyud87
    I appreciate the very quick response.
    Yes, Linux. But I'm actually using Zotero 4 standalone with a Firefox plug-in and that seems to work fine.
    I understand there's nothing I can do about this now but when the switch to Electron happens, I hope someone sets up an ARM compilation. (I might give it a try but I'm not sure I have enough expertise.)
    Thanks again for an outstanding piece of software.
  • dstillman
    edited July 26, 2018
    Well, we certainly weren't building Zotero 4 for ARM Linux. We just distributed i686 and x86_64 versions. Are you using a package from your distro? If so, you'd have to ask the package maintainers (who would have to build the Zotero 5 client from a newer Firefox-for-ARM-Linux base).
  • oneyud87
    Yes, it was a Debian package. I didn't realize that didn't come from you but of course you are right.
    Here is the zotero-standalone in the Debian repository: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/zotero-standalone
    And it does indeed look like the developers are working on a v5 which is still in development and has not been released:
    https://qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/watch?pkg=zotero-standalone-build
  • franz47
    edited October 22, 2018
    Do I understand correctly that at the moment still there is no way to have v5 on a Raspberry Pi which can sync files with a WEBDAV server and the Zotero database under Raspbian?

    I just tried out the v4 Zotero which came with the latest Raspbian and found out that synchronisation is not working any more with v4, no dirs and files appeared on my WEBDAV server.

    Is there any other Linux version for the Raspberry Pi which would offer syncing?
  • Pelement
    I love zotero and would like to install on a chrome or windows tablet running an arm processor.Has anyone found a method to compile or get zotero5 working on an arm device.
    Thanks
  • charlesrivest1
    Any development?

    Thanks
  • adamsmith
    Nothing new, but note that the move to Electron that dstillman mentions in his post above has not yet happened (and is still planned), so that's still the most likely way this is going to happen.
  • jon-freed
    For anybody who might stumble upon this like I did: Here's my attempt at summarizing the status of running Zotero client on Raspberry Pi as of today:

    The central problem is that Raspberry Pi has an ARM architecture rather than x86.

    OFFICIAL/NATIVE:

    - The Zotero client uses XUL and is therefore is tied closely to Firefox. Although people are using Firefox on ARM (e.g. via snap https://snapcraft.io/firefox), Mozilla itself apparently has not released a Linux ARM build that Zotero can use. When it does, then a build for linux arm64/aarch64 can be added to the existing Zotero build process. See https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/3550#issuecomment-2290744607.

    - For years, there have been long term plans for Zotero to switch away from XUL and Firefox to React and perhaps either React Native or Electron. Either would enable use of Zotero on ARM. It's unclear to me what the status of that switch is, but there has been movement on react-related issues as recently as August 2024 (https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/4482).

    WORKAROUNDS:

    - Via a custom build: See the linked pull above. (#3550)

    - Via box64: This doesn't seem to be working, currently. See https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/issues/1826.

    - Via docker: It may be possible to run Zotero within a docker container and image.

  • dstillman
    For years, there have been long term plans for Zotero to switch away from XUL and Firefox to React and perhaps either React Native or Electron.
    (We have no plans to switch away from Firefox. React Native was never the plan, and we abandoned the idea of switching to Electron years ago. Zotero only minimally uses React, but that's not relevant here either way.)
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