Evince can not open links in snap Firefox

Question

When I click on a link in a PDF document in Evince, it does not work. Instead, I only see cursor turning into a spinner and a message appearing in the terminal:

env: ‘/snap/bin/firefox’: Permission denied

The closest thing I have found is the following bug report for evince itself https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/1090

which suggests that the problem is in the AppArmor profiles that do not allow Evince to run programs in the home directory.

How can I solve this?

I use Ubuntu 21.10 with Firefox installed from Snaps

Update Nov 2023 The bug have been fixed in Ubuntu 23.10. For bug discussion see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/1794064

Is this problem due to Evince being a snap or Firefox being a snap? I think in your case, it is the second. — FedKad, Feb 01 '22 at 20:03
@FedKad Firefox is a snap, Evince is deb from Ubuntu repositories — Ilya Popov, Feb 01 '22 at 20:11
Then, remove the snap version of Firefox and install the "apt" (deb) version. You may need to save and reuse the "profile folder" of Firefox though! — FedKad, Feb 02 '22 at 08:10
@FedKad that is just a workaround that will not be applicable anymore for the next Ubuntu release. — vanadium, Feb 02 '22 at 10:26
Can you provide detail on the type of link? Is this a www URL, or a link to a local file? — vanadium, Feb 02 '22 at 10:32
I reported a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1968552 - you may want to click "affects me too". — Valentijn Sessink, Apr 11 '22 at 11:03
Same issue by the way with the Chromium snap if you make it the default browser: env: ‘/snap/bin/chromium’: Permission denied — Michael Opdenacker, Jun 16 '22 at 15:08

gdu · Answer 1 · 2022-09-11T16:05:58.490

This env: ‘/snap/bin/firefox’: Permission denied or env: ‘/snap/bin/chromium’: Permission denied issue in evince launched through a terminal can be traced back to apparmor. Doing tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep -i apparmor (from here), you may find a line where the following appears apparmor="DENIED" operation="exec" name="/usr/bin/snap" profile="/usr/bin/evince" comm="env".

This can maybe be fixed by tuning the /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince profile, or by a modification of the abstractions like /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/ubuntu-helpers or /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/ubuntu-browsers (e.g. here or there).

A radical change which worked for me but may lead to security issues is to just disable apparmor for evince with sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince /etc/apparmor.d/disable/usr.bin.evince. It it written there that sudo service apparmor restart would then engage the changes but a full computer restart was needed in my case.

EDIT: A somewhat less radical move could be to add a /usr/bin/snap Ux, line towards the end of the /usr/bin/evince {...} block of /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince (see here) and restarting the service with sudo service apparmor restart. That may still not be entirely safe, though.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 26 '22 at 12:19

1

Try uninstalling Evince from APT and installing it from Snap:

sudo apt remote evince
sudo snap install evince

You may need to log out and in again. You may also need to reconfigure the file type associations.

This was suggested in the bug report discussion. Apparently, at the moment, you need either Evince and your browser from APT, or both from snap.

answered Oct 26 '22 at 12:19

MakisH

1,102

Update: I reverted to Evince from apt, as I then had other issues integrating with the rest of the system. – MakisH Nov 24 '22 at 10:38
Update 2: In case that is an option for you to consider another PDF reader, Okular from APT works just fine. – MakisH Feb 19 '23 at 08:41

Evince can not open links in snap Firefox

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