Hi folks,
Having a bit of trouble with Inform 7 on Debian. When I try to open a project, all of the folders are greyed-out in the file manager GUI. I already tried chmod +rwx on gnome-inform7, but no luck. I am thinking maybe inform does not have access to opening files with the default install, but I am new to Linux, too and having a bit of trouble figuring it out. If anyone has any hints, that would be great.
Hi Matt, and welcome to the forum!
I’m not an expert in that area, but I remember that there have been some threads where people reported similar problems, and user @interactivefiction implemented several fixes and posted links to an updated build, I think.
Here are the pertinent threads:
and
Hope this helps (and of course, as I said, the credit is due to @interactivefiction) 
Wow, thank you so much for the links. I’ll follow the threads and see if I can figure it out.
By the way, this is the most advanced forum software I have ever come across. So intuitive and easy to use. Any idea what it is?
Discourse! We switched to it pretty recently, and it’s made things orders of magnitude earlier on the moderating side, so I’m a big fan.
Also, yeah, it’s a problem in the file picker, nothing with permissions. The hacky workaround is to create a symlink called ~/InformProjects.inform pointing to ~/Documents/Inform or whatever; the problem is that the file picker only lets you click on folders named *.inform, and it starts in ~, so by default there’s no way to get to where your Inform projects actually are.
Hi Matt-
StJohnLimbo is correct, there are several updated deb packages on the threads he mentioned. In particular the greyed out file browser issue you mention was due to a change in GTK libraries regarding the behavior of file type filters applied to a GTK file browser dialog. So there should be no need to chmod your files if you use one of the newer debs I posted. That said if you prefer to continue with the version you have, it might be helpful to mention that there should be an area where you can directly type in a file path to a inform project folder. I believe it is at the top or bottom of the file browser dialog when it opens depending on OS. I used this approach to opening files for a quite a while myself! Hope this helps.
May I ask which version of Debian OS are you using? One user on Debian 10 has observed some problems and if you are on the same OS it would be great to know if you encounter the same problems (or not)!
Actually this is a Debian branch called Bunsen Labs. It is based:depends on Debian 9.
The symlink solution should work, and the explanation that Inform only can see folders labeled with inform is super helpful!