Peter Flynn wrote:
How do I know what account the LyX postinstall script from the RPM has picked to run as? The RPM was installed as root, of course, but if LyX has picked something else to use to run its script, that is hidden from sight -- what's the best way to find out (and why on earth would they want to do such a weird thing anyway?).
Sorry, my wording was fuzzy. I don't have a working Linux box handy these days, but I assume that LyX runs with the permissions of whatever user is logged in. So if you can run latex directly, presumably when you run the LyX configure script it has the same permissions.
kpsewhich and all the TeX binaries are in /usr/local/bin, which is in every user's path, AFAIK.
If you're motivated, you could hack the configure script to add a couple of echo commands that might tell you at least where things are going south. If I'm reading the configure script correctly, the quest for a working copy of LaTeX is done in two parts. First, every directory on the path is scanned for either 'latex' or 'latex2e'. (More precisely, the path is scanned for 'latex', then if necessary for 'latex2e'.) If a file with the correct name is found, LyX then tries to run it against a test .ltx file to determine if it's a working version of LaTeX. So it might be helpful to echo each directory being searched.
By the way, IIRC there have been misadventures in the past caused by people having a both functional and dysfunctional LaTeX installations, with the dysfunctional one first on the path. If I'm reading the script correctly (and that's a big "if", since I'm not a Linux user), once it finds a 'latex' file, it stops searching for other 'latex' files even if the one it finds doesn't pass the functionality test. Might be worth checking.
HTH, Paul
