Installing Zotero on Linux

Posted on Wed 28 January 2015 in blog

I've been playing with a new research tool called Zotero, which helps you keep track of research papers, etc. as you come across them.

I'm using their standalone version, which Chrome can push to via an extension. So far it seems really nice.

Zotero doesn't come with an installer on Linux, and I wanted to put it somewhere more permanent than my Downloads directory. So I did the following which makes Zotero feel very at home on my Centos 7 machine.

  1. Download the Linux tar.bz2 file

  2. Switch to root, and move the tar.bz2 file to /opt and extract it. Then rename the output directory:

$ sudo su -
# mv Zotero-4.0.25.2_linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 /opt
# cd /opt
# tar xf Zotero-4.0.25.2_linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
# rm Zotero-4.0.25.2_linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
# mv Zotero_linux-x86_64 zotero
  1. Retrieve the Zotero icon and add it to the icons/ directory:
# wget -O zotero/icons/zotero-new-z-48px.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zotero/zotero/4.0/chrome/skin/default/zotero/zotero-new-z-48px.png
  1. Now as your user, create the desktop shortcut, using this .desktop file I put together:
# exit
$ wget -O ~/.local/share/applications/zotero.desktop http://goo.gl/BAJhYu

Note that the standalone version of Zotero keeps its local data in ~/.zotero. That's it! Enjoy!

Linux