Only runs with sudo on Ubuntu

[chrisbennington]

After a recent update (not sure if it was Calibre update or Ubuntu), I can now now longer run calibre without using sudo.

Any guidance on how to fix this?

[haertig]

What error message are you getting? "Permission denied" on some executable, Calibre can no longer read it's data directory, what?

You can see a log of what software has been installed and what updates were made in Synaptic. Just use File->History. So if you can recall when Calibre last worked, you can look at what's been installed/updated since then and maybe get a clue.

I'm thinking this is more likely a user or script oopsie that got a little too sloppy with the chmod or chown command. But first you have to better describe what you're seeing (specifically) before we can speculate further.

[gbm]

Originally Posted by chrisbennington

After a recent update (not sure if it was Calibre update or Ubuntu), I can now now longer run calibre without using sudo.

Any guidance on how to fix this?

Open a terminal and run calibre in debug mode and post the results.

calibre-debug -g

What version of calibre and Ubuntu are you using?

bernie

[theducks]

Originally Posted by haertig

I'm thinking this is more likely a user or script oopsie that got a little too sloppy with the chmod or chown command. But first you have to better describe what you're seeing (specifically) before we can speculate further.

Calibre needs FULL rights for the Library folder (and children)

Calibre also need normal User (Full, owner) rights to the hidden configuration folder.

[sjfan]

Originally Posted by chrisbennington

After a recent update (not sure if it was Calibre update or Ubuntu), I can now now longer run calibre without using sudo.

Any guidance on how to fix this?

Open a terminal window. cd to the top level directory of your calibre library. Make sure that you are in the right directory (there should be a metadata.db file in this directory, as well as subdirectories for all your authors).

To fix the permissions on you library, do this:

> echo meta*
# make sure that printed "metadata.db"; if it didn't, then stop and don't execute the following
> sudo chown -R $USER .
> sudo chmod -R u+rw .
> find . -t d -print0 |xargs -0 sudo chmod u+x

That should fix the permissions on your library at least enough for calibre to work, though you may want to set the group/other permissions differently depending on what access you want.

If it's still borked, then it's likely the config files that have a permissions problem; go to the ~/.config/calibre directory, double-check that you are actually in that directory, and run the same 3 last commands to fix the permissions there.