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Ariel Serranoni
Asked: 2019-08-10 11:45:48 +0800 CST

Running Mendeley in ubuntu 19.04

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I'm running ubuntu 19.04 via WSL on Windows 10. I have installed Mendeley Desktop on ubuntu but when I run the command sudo mendeleydesktop on my terminal I get the following error:

QStandardPaths: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set, defaulting to '/tmp/runtime-root'
QFSFileEngine::open: No file name specified
shared memfd open() failed: Function not implemented
Home directory not accessible: Permission denied
[1388:1421:0809/164443.644408:FATAL:udev_linux.cc(29)] Check failed: 0 == ret (0 vs. -22)
#0 0x7f8947eab0a5 <unknown>
#1 0x7f8947ec0eca <unknown>
#2 0x7f8946e2b8b6 <unknown> ...

Does anyone know how to get around this issue?

mendeley 19.04

1 Answers

  1. First and foremost, I strongly recommend you to never run mendeley as super-user (i.e. with sudo). On top of the fact that this program does not need such privilege to work properly, it is also fairly risky: we are talking about a closed-source program, which means that even-though it comes from a trusted source (do we really trust Elsevier though?), nobody apart from Elsevier knows how it works. So who knows what it is actually going to do with such privileges?

    Concerning your question:

    TL;DR: after backing up your files (in particular Mendeley library folder…) do a mendeleydesktop --reset.

    More details:

    I just ran into a similar problem, which I just fixed. I am using a computer that was originally installed with Ubuntu 18.04. I did an upgrade to 20.04 by installing a brand new / partition in place of the former one, while keeping my /home partition. This means that eventhough the "system" partition (/) was reinstalled from scratch, the configuration files were kept (because they are stored in /home).

    So I had to reinstall all the applications I use, including Mendeley. I went to the Mendeley website and downloaded the latest version (1.19.4) "for Generic Linux" which comes as a .tar.bz. After unzipping the archive and copying it to /opt/mendeleyDesktop/, mendeley can be started as ./bin/mendeleydesktop… And I ran into exactly the same problem as you did!

    The fix: using the answer from this forum, I resetted mendeley by typing ./bin/mendeleydesktop --reset which deletes all configuration files (includes the local copy of the Mendeley library, so you might want to do a backup of it first). After that, mendeley could run smoothly as it always had been.

    In the end, it seems the problem was a conflict with the configuration files of my previous install of mendeley, which I had kept.

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