viewHelp issue in Ubuntu

[Ayah Almousa]

Hi, all,

I recently got a new computer and installed the most recent version of Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS and Macaulay2 1.21. When I type "viewHelp"  in M2 I get the error:

Gtk-Message: 10:45:04.681: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.

Firefox does attempt to open, but in the window it says:

Access to the file was denied

The file at /home/ayah/.Macaulay2/index.html is not readable.

    It may have been removed, moved, or file permissions may be preventing access.

Does anyone have suggestions? I suspect this is more of an "Ubuntu" issue rather than a Macaulay2 issue because typing "help" works just fine. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Ayah

[Ayah Almousa]

Hi, all,

I actually resolved the issue myself pretty quickly, sorry for the multiple messages. It seems that the issue is that Firefox is installed with snap in this distribution of Ubuntu, and when installed this way Firefox can't read hidden files.

The solution is to uninstall the snap package version of Firefox and reinstall it directly from the Firefox ppa used by the Mozilla team. The following worked for me.

sudo snap remove firefox

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa

echo '
Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001
' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox

echo 'Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins:: "LP-PPA-mozillateam:${distro_codename}";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/51unattended-upgrades-firefox

sudo apt install firefox

Hopefully this is helpful to others in my situation.

--Ayah