Mendeley is a combination of a desktop application and a website which helps you manage, share and discover both content and contacts in research.

The Desktop version offers automatic extraction of document details, management of your papers with full text search, sharing and synchronization, among other features. The website provides an online backup of your library, a variety of statistics about your research behavior, a research network and a recommendation engine for papers that might interest you.

When I discover this application I thought it was awesome and wanted to use it for my own research needs. However, every time I tried to install it on my fedora (first fedora 13 and now fedora 14) I was presented with some problem: sometimes I couldn’t even start the application because Mendeley was unable to load libssl, although the library was packed with Mendeley Desktop for Generic Linux. When I was finally able to fix the problem linking the version of  libssl installed in the system, the application wouldn’t start due to a compatibility problem between the system’s libssl and the Qt libraries packed with Mendeley so I had to download the latest Qt for my system and remove the packed libraries in order to finally run application. However, there was another problem, I could explore my local library and add new papers but couldn’t synch that information with my account on the website… and it was like that for a long time, until today, when I decided to look for a solution again and this time I found it. Continue reading →