Thanks for the suggestion; I did make sure there were both owner and group permission up the branch to the directory the files were in. I also tried writing in the home directory, and changing all permissions to 777. Originally I was using spreadsheets, but I tried and documents have the same problem.
This may suggest something: when I try writing the error is “Error saving the document test: Object not accessible. The object cannot be accessed due to insufficient user rights”. I looked in the proc file system. The program is running in my home directory:
$ sudo ps auxw | grep ibre
russell 190748 0.0 0.0 4972 3840 pts/0 S+ 11:44 0:00 /bin/bash /snap/libreoffice/324/libreoffice.wrapper
russell 190801 1.3 1.7 2023448 514004 pts/0 Sl+ 11:44 0:14 /snap/libreoffice/324/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin
russell 191511 0.0 0.0 12372 2432 pts/1 S+ 12:02 0:00 grep ibre
$ sudo ls -ld /proc/190801/cwd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 russell russell 0 Jul 30 11:50 /proc/190801/cwd -> /home/russell
and (of course) I have full read and write permissions there. One thing looks like it might be odd: when I look at the open files I see:
$ sudo ls -l /proc/190801/fd
total 0
...
lr-x------ 1 russell russell 64 Jul 30 12:08 53 -> '/home/russell/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/root (deleted)'
lrwx------ 1 russell russell 64 Jul 30 12:08 66 -> '/memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)'
lr-x------ 1 russell russell 64 Jul 30 12:08 90 -> '/home/russell/.local/share/gvfs- metadata/root-791e31ce.log (deleted)'
...
$
These files are deleted - I do have read/write privilege in /home/russell/.local/share.
I also looked at proc/…/environ, and found everything looked OK - variables TMPDIR and TEMPDIR both exist and both pointed to writable directories.
This is really frustrating - I actually loaded freeoffice so at least I can work. It is hard to believe that a new, standard ubuntu machine with a new, standard libreoffice can have this problem. I have literally done nothing since the load but apt install a few programs and customize a few user settings.
