Zotero (bibliography manager) tarball on Fedora 40 [KDE] - how I got it working

I’ve just recently migrated from Win10 to Fedora 40 KDE, and have been setting up my Thinkpad for academic research and project management. I’m posting here because it took me a while to figure out how to get Zotero 7 working on Fedora 40. Hope this helps someone.

Problems:

  • There is no RPM package for Zotero.
  • The Zotero Flatpak from Flathub is unsupported by Zotero.org, and is broken (LibreOffice extension doesn’t work).
  • The official Zotero installation guide for their official tarball doesn’t work on Fedora 40, and the developer doesn’t seem to clarify this in their own forum.
  • The ‘run’ commands in their FAQ don’t work in Fedora.

Offered solution
Install the following libraries beforehand: libXinerama, cups-libs, dbus-glib
(Zotero will not run without these libraries)
sudo dnf install libXinerama cups-libs dbus-glib

Extract the official tarball from Zotero into a temporary folder (e.g. Downloads), then rename this extracted folder to ‘zotero’
Move this ‘zotero’ folder to /opt/zotero/: e.g. from the Downloads folder:
sudo mv ./zotero/ /opt/zotero/
Then go to /opt/zotero/ and do the following:
./set_launcher_icon (you can’t just type ‘set_launcher_icon’ as their FAQ guide instructs)
ln -s /opt/zotero/zotero.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/zotero.desktop

Zotero launch icon should now appear in the desktop.

If you just want to run Zotero from its own folder then you type ./zotero and not just “zotero” by itself.

Feel free to add any corrections/amendments. Cheers :slight_smile:

(Edits: typos)

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You could tell people reading this topic what zoteto is and why it’a useful.

I don’t Zotero myself (I use JabRef) but I had looked into how to use it on my Fedora. There’s a FlatPak for it which may be easier to set up:

As mentioned, the current Flatpak has broken functionality.

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I don’t use Libreoffice myself, which is probably why I didn’t run into that issue when I’d tested it out.

Hi, thank you so much for this. I’ve got zotero running through the terminal via the tarball but I can’t get the launch icon to work, I’ve followed your steps and can see that the zotero.desktop file is in the right place. any tips? I’m running fedora 41.

I’ve managed to get the app icon showing in the dock, but clicking it doesn’t make zotero run! I can run zotero from the terminal fine using ./zotero

Dear Anna.
The zotero.desktop file is just a launcher (you can duckduckgo “.desktop files linux”). The command it runs after clicking on the icon is given in the Exec line. If you change that line to the zotero binary, then clicking the icon will work.

murpho0@eva02:~/Downloads/Zotero-7.0.11_linux-x86_64/Zotero_linux-x86_64$ ln -s /home/murpho0/Downloads/Zotero-7.0.11_linux-x86_64/Zotero_linux-x86_64/zotero.desktop  /home/murpho0/.local/share/applications/zotero.desktop
murpho0@eva02:~/Downloads/Zotero-7.0.11_linux-x86_64/Zotero_linux-x86_64$ cat zotero.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Zotero
Exec=/home/murpho0/Downloads/Zotero-7.0.11_linux-x86_64/Zotero_linux-x86_64/zotero
Icon=/home/murpho0/Downloads/Zotero-7.0.11_linux-x86_64/Zotero_linux-x86_64/icons/icon128.png
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Office;
MimeType=text/plain;x-scheme-handler/zotero;application/x-research-info-systems;text/x-research-info-systems;text/ris;application/x-endnote-refer;application/x-inst-for-Scientific-info;application/mods+xml;application/rdf+xml;application/x-bibtex;text/x-bibtex;application/marc;application/vnd.citationstyles.style+xml
X-GNOME-SingleWindow=true

Note that I did the link with absolute paths and that I did not move the extracted dir to a new location, as specified in the instructions.
Hope it helps.

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There is no RPM package for Zotero.

Not in official repos, but I use the copr repository for Zotero by el-file4138. It works well for me.

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