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My Mendeley-desktop application suddenly started crashing on Ubuntu 16.04. It says:

Another application has your Mendeley database open. Closing the other program or logging out of your computer may fix the problem.

It flashes for a second with this written on the login screen. I have another account 'Administrator' which I think has it opened since when I log in as 'Administrator', the application runs fine. Here is what I have tried:

  • reinstall in my account.

  • remove it from 'Administrator' account and install in mine.

I cannot get it to work on my account. How does it get it to stop capturing the said database?

Note: I can open it in my account using

sudo nautilus

But I want to be able to run it with my account.

ThunderBird
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Zero
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2 Answers2

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Looks like you broke the access permissions inside your user home directory by running applications as super-user within the same home directory. You can reset the ownership and thus regain access with:

sudo chown -R "$USER:" "$HOME"

See Why should users never use normal sudo to start graphical applications? for an explanation why you shouldn't use sudo to start graphical applications and How do I start Nautilus as root? for alternatives (applies to other graphical applications too).

David Foerster
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  • perfect and thanks for the extra info...makes a lot sense – Zero May 23 '18 at 01:01
  • Dangerous advice. This resets ownership of all the files within home directory, recursively, and is not undo-able. The other answer makes more sense. – Mostafa Farzán Sep 06 '20 at 13:30
  • @MostafaFarzán: Technically yes, but I what the intersection of users who 1) can run sudo, 2) are unaware what chown -R does and 3) have files in their home directories that they should not own, is quite small. – David Foerster Sep 07 '20 at 01:39
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Exactly that was the cause of the problem. Mendeley local database located in

~/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley Desktop/

Hence, one need to change the owner of this folder to the current user. 

sudo chown -R $(whoami) ~/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd.
alshaboti
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