cannot login

guillaumebouzige
I have installed both in debian via repo and in fedora via flatpak.

In debian via .deb, when I click on login button nothing happen, even if default URI for webbrowser is correctly setup in system.

In fedora via flatpak, when I click on login button firefox open but without loading any specific address just the fedora magazine default page, even if I went myself to zotero.org then login it cannot sync with zotero app to let me login....

so far I cannot access my account it sucks
  • guillaumebouzige
    debug id D347175474
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited May 7, 2026
    We can't help with the Flatpak — that's a sandboxed third-party package.

    If by .deb you mean zotero-deb, that should work.

    To log in, Zotero needs to be able to launch a web browser. That should work in general, and if it's not, you'll need to debug this on your system — too many things can affect this on Linux. Does the "?" button in the corner of the settings pane work? That also should just open a webpage via the same mechanism.
  • guillaumebouzige
    in flatpak it does start the browser but it doesnt load the url and even if I login it does not care


    with debian I have try everything and gave up to try flatpak

    is there any workaround ?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    See above.
  • guillaumebouzige
    above you do not mention any workaround to login
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    I said everything we can say about this above.
  • guillaumebouzige
    So following your only advice, I have gave up on flatpak and went back on a fresh Debian 13 installed via retorque repo below, I have also installed firefox-esr and launched it right

    $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zotero.list
    deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/zotero-archive-keyring.gpg by-hash=force] https://zotero.retorque.re/file/apt-package-archive ./

    Here is the errors I have when I start zotero and try to login

    $ zotero
    [5573, Main Thread] WARNING: Locale not supported by C library.
    Using the fallback 'C' locale.: 'glib warning', file /builds/worker/checkouts/gecko/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:201

    (Zotero:5573): Gtk-WARNING **: 10:07:40.207: Locale not supported by C library.
    Using the fallback 'C' locale.
    Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: libpci missing (t=8.71024) [GFX1-]: glxtest: libpci missing
    Missing chrome or resource URL: chrome://zotero/skin/16/white/loading.svg
    Error: flatpak-spawn(1) not found
    Error: flatpak-spawn(1) not found

    why there is a flatpak-spawn ? there is no flatpak installed.

    the default browser is set
    $ xdg-settings get default-web-browser
    firefox.desktop
  • guillaumebouzige
    so the issue was from the fact that my debian is running inside a podman/toolbox container (fedora atomic)

    solution is :

    install flatpak-xdg-utils

    sudo apt install flatpak-xdg-utils

    go in advance settings, config editor and modify value of
    extensions.zotero.fallbackLauncher.unix
    to
    /usr/libexec/flatpak-xdg-utils/xdg-open

    like it is presented here https://github.com/zotero/zotero/commit/79b1fe30dcb36b810fae27bbae4e1197688bae52

    as a workaround...

    so it does start the web browser now but it does not load the zotero url so even if I am already logged in the browser I cannot proceed with login
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    What happens if you run

    /usr/libexec/flatpak-xdg-utils/xdg-open https://www.zotero.org

    from a shell?
  • guillaumebouzige
    it works from the shell.

    now I got to the point that it does load the web browser but not the URL !

    I have try with downloading the .targ.gz and running the binary directly (out of any container or else) and it does start the browser nicely but do not load the url so no chance to login.

    This is a real issue for me because the login before never relied on the external web browser for auth, I am in the impossibility to use Zotero anymore unless where it was already installed and configured and went trough updates without need to login anymore.

    This new way to login is adding more complexity and therefor it is more fragile to issues like the one we are having now...
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    By default, Zotero simply launches the URL via the system's default HTTP handler. If that fails, all it does is fall back to the fallbackLauncher.unix executable with the URL as the first argument:

    https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/504447de41b81d856688ca7d655faac2b62d79d3/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/zotero.js#L1224

    There's not actually any sign in your original debug output of it falling back to the pref, but if you think it is (which should show as "launchWithURI() not supported -- trying fallback executable" in the debug output), you can swap in a shell script that logs the command-line arguments to see what's happening.

    We can think about adding a way to get the login URL from either the settings pane or the debug output, but this isn't a general problem or we'd have gotten countless reports of this from Linux users since we launched this in beta several months ago. The new login flow is necessary to support MFA and provide other account protections.
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