I'm migrating to a new server/workstation and now I FUBAR'd lyx so it does not load.
While looking in preferences to see if I could set the default window size there (for a 1250x1024 dpi monitor) I did not find an appropriate setting. But I did see that the UI file was a system-wide one rather than ~/.lyx/ui/classic.ui. In preferences I changed to that UI file and killed the lyx process. When I tried to reload the application it failed: LyXComm: Pipe /home/rshepard/.lyx/lyxpipe.in already exists. If no other LyX program is active, please delete the pipe by hand and try again. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/lyx/scripts/prefs2prefs.py", line 202, in <module> main(sys.argv) File "/usr/share/lyx/scripts/prefs2prefs.py", line 167, in main lines = read(source) File "/usr/share/lyx/scripts/prefs2prefs.py", line 52, in read lines = source.read().splitlines() or [''] File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/codecs.py", line 314, in decode (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final) LookupError: unknown error handler name 'surrogateescape' filetools.cpp (1221): Could not run file conversion script prefs2prefs.py. GuiApplication.cpp (3092): Unable to convert /home/rshepard/.lyx/ui/classic.ui to format 4. GuiApplication.cpp (3099): Unable to read UI file: /home/rshepard/.lyx/ui/classic.ui I deleted the lyxpipe.in and that had no effect on trying to start. FWIW, I have python3-3.7.4 installed and no longer use python2, but keep it on the system until the distribution drops it. Four questions: 1) How do I fix the inability of lyx to read prefs2prefs.py so I can start the application? 2) How do I fix the inability of lyx to convert classic.ui to format 4? 3) Where can I set the default lyx window size (running Xfce4)? 4) What is done to have lyx use python3 rather than python2? (And, I still need to get the current document compiled to use US letter size pages, not 6.5 x 9.5 custom pages.) TIA, Rich