Failed to update Zotero after changing permission with chmod 707

I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I have installed Zotero adding the PPA, following the instructions in this page. It worked all well, but when I try to get any update, I get the following error message:

In order to "modify the Zotero program directory to be writable by your user account" I applied sudo chmod 707 zotero, as described here and, as far as can see from the screen shot below (which was generated by the command ls -lg /usr/bin), the changes took place successfully:

Is there anything wrong with this terminal output? Shouldn't I have reading, writing and execute (rwx) permissions for user, according to this output?

Solution 1:

With that command you only changed the permissions for the executable file, not for all the files the program uses (and probably needs to update).

I recommend that you chmod the /usr/bin/zotero file back to 755 and instead run the Zotero updater with sudo and it should have the rights needed to update itself.

EDIT: It is recommended to run sudo su to open up a root shell and then just run zotero as a command line command to open it with root rights. Directly running sudo zotero is not recommended because it uses your real home directory and you may end up with root-owned files in your home directory.

Solution 2:

You'll want to also change the permissions of the /opt/zotero folder by running:

sudo chmod 707 /usr/bin/zotero && sudo chmod -R 707 /opt/zotero

Solution 3:

I just came across this exactly same problem.

The following worked for me:

sudo chmod -R a+rwx /usr/bin/zotero && sudo chmod -R a+rwx /opt/zotero

Basically, this is giving Read+Write+Execute permissions to both folders.