Mendeley desktop won't work on ubuntu 16.04

Question

I've been trying to install Mendeley on ubuntu 16.04. I followed the installation guide on their website but it simply doesn't start. The icon appears when I run it and in 3 seconds it disappears. Any thoughts?

Output of running mendeleydesktop in terminal

Unable to use Qt libraries in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu. Some components are missing:
 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQtWebKit.so.4 To run Mendeley Desktop you may need to install the QtWebKit and QtSvg packages provided by your Linux distribution. Using bundled SSL runtime libraries /usr/bin/../../opt/mendeleydesktop/bin/mendeleydesktop: error while loading shared libraries: libgstapp-0.10.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory 

Solution 1

Open a terminal and run

sudo apt-get install libqtsvg4-perl libqtwebkit4

I had this exact error and after Mark Kirby's answer I still had the problem. After running the above, now Mendeley launches and syncs all my data (yeah!).

What I don't know is if it was just what I wrote above or if you need this and also Mark Kirby's answer both.

Source of answer: http://ubuntuforum-br.org/index.php?topic=120046.0

Solution 2

You seem to be missing some dependencies qtwebkit and qtsvg

Open a terminal and run

sudo apt install qt4-dev-tools

Now try to run it again.

Solution 3

To install the minimum requirements on Ubuntu 16.04 follow:

sudo apt-get install libqtwebkit4 libqt4-svg

Comments

[manutsa]

got this: 'libqt5webkit5 is already the newest version'

[Mark Kirby]

Try this updated version.

[John]

I have the exact same error as the OP. This did not fix it. It did install the tools but the error I get is still the same (as in the question). Any other ideas?

[Mark Kirby]

I took this from stack overflow in case this did not work, run sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev @John Same error but different app stackoverflow.com/questions/26869830/…

[John]

Thanks @MarkKirby. After applying my answer it's working. I'm not sure if your extra solution would have also done the trick (also like the OP, I'm quite the newbie).

[John]

@aconkey Thanks for posting this. I'm sure it will help someone in the future.