John W. Sheppard, PhD wrote:
I apologize beforehand if this is one of those emails that appears a lot on the list. I have looked through the www.lyx.org website and don't seem to be able to find what I am looking for.
The empty textclass.lst phenomenon occurs repeatedly in the list, but your symptoms are somewhat different from most.
Recently, I downloaded lyx 1.3.6 for Windows and installed it. At first, everything worked great until I attempted to install some packages that I just "skipped through" during initial installation.
Were the "skipped" packages LaTeX packages (and, if so, are you using MiKTeX), or were they supporting programs (Ghostscript, MinSYS, ...)?
Now, when I run lyx, I instantly get a popup message that says LyX wasn't able to find any layout description! Check the contents of the file "textclass.lst" Sorry, has to exist :-( [OK] I press the OK button and everything goes away. I looked at textclass.lst and don't see anything useful.
There are (or should be) two copies of textclass.lst on your system. One would be in C:\Program Files\LyX\Resources\lyx (assuming that's where you installed LyX), and the other would be in C:\Documents and Settings\your_id_here\Application Data\lyx. Which did you look at (both?), and did you see content in them, or were they empty (zero bytes)? The most common, if not only, problem with textclass.lst on Windows systems seems to be the configure script writing a zero-length file as a result of something going wrong.
I attempted to "manually run" configure, but that doesn't work either. I have also attempted to uninstall and reinstall, but nothing changes.
By "manually run", do you mean running 'sh configure' in the C:\Program Files\LyX\Resources\lyx directory? If so, does that spew a lot of progress information to the shell window and, most importantly, does it indicate that a working copy of latex.exe was found?
Paul