Robert McDonald's questions

Using Ubuntu 22.04, I installed firefox from the mozillateam ppa (current installed version is 118.0.1). I have data stored on /dev/sda1, mounted as /data, and Ubuntu 22.04 installed on /dev/nvme0n1p2. The data on sda1 is accessed via symlinks. When I use Firefox to save to, or read from, a directory symlinked from /dev/sda1, I get these errors:

• saving: The file could not be saved because you do not have the proper permissions. Choose another save directory.
• reading: The following files couldn't be attached: foo.zip. Please try again later.

I have not found any other application (including Chrome and Edge) that has this limitation. I'm trying to figure out if there is a security setting in firefox responsible for this or if there is something in my configuration to take a look at.

Firefox works fine with directories symlinked within the install partition.

Update: Responding to @vanadium I confirmed that the deb version of Firefox is running --- System monitor shows the process is /usr/lib/firefox/firefox. However I notice that Security Context is firefox (enforce). For both Emacs and Chrome, Security Context is unconfined. I'm guessing this is the issue? If so, exactly what does this mean and how can it be changed?

I am running 18.04 and trying to use version 2.1 of the R package pdftools. Some functionality requires poppler >= 0.73. (A poppler version requirement is documented in ?pdftools::pdf_data.)

I obtained poppler-0.73.0.tar.xz and poppler-data-0.4.9.tar.gz from https://poppler.freedesktop.org/. I extracted, followed the INSTALL instructions, and all seemed to work. I can verify that /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpoppler.so points to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpoppler.so.73. I'm not sure what else to look for or whether update-alternatives would be helpful.

In R, when I run pdftools::pdf_data this happens:

> pdf_data(fn)
Error in poppler_pdf_data(loadfile(pdf), opw, upw) : 
  pdf_data() requires poppler >= 0.73. You have 0.62.0

Other functions in pdftools work, but pdf_data is documented to required poppler >= 0.73. I'm wondering what else I need to do to have 0.73 recognized.

EDIT: Following helpful suggestions at Installing poppler-0.62.0 on ubuntu 16.04, I ran apt-cache policy poppler-0.73 and got:

poppler-0.73:
  Installed: 20190125-0.73
  Candidate: 20190125-0.73
  Version table:
 *** 20190125-0.73 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

This seems to suggest that 0.73 is installed.

The output of apt-cache policy r-base-core is

r-base-core:
  Installed: 3.5.2-1bionic
  Candidate: 3.5.2-1bionic
  Version table:
 *** 3.5.2-1bionic 500
        500 https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/ Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.5.1-2bionic 500
        500 https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/ Packages
     3.5.1-1bionic 500
        500 https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/ Packages
     3.5.0-1bionic 500
        500 https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/ Packages
     3.4.4-1ubuntu1 500
        500 http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 Packages