[R] ERROR: 'latex' needed but missing on your system.

[Marc Schwartz]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 09:56 -0400, Joel J. Adamson wrote:
> Gad Abraham writes:
>  > Joel J. Adamson wrote:
>  > > After successfully building R on Slackware Linux v11.0 I went to make
>  > > the documentation; the texi files went fine and then I hopefully issued
>  > > 
>  > > make dvi
>  > > 
>  > > after having gotten the warning to the effect of "You cannot build the
>  > > DVI or PDF manuals, you are a loser" during compilation. And, as
>  > > expected I got the
>  > > error
>  > > 
>  > > ERROR: 'latex' needed but missing on your system.
>  > 
>  > It's a bit strange, because by default files like latex should be 
>  > readable by all users. Did you install latex from source?
> 
> No, teTeX is installed as part of Slackware 11.0.  Yes, it's readable
> by all users (including root, of course), but 
> configure does not find it and issues a warning.  Then the "make dvi"
> gives the error I quote above.
> 
> I think the real issue is my ignorance of makefiles and configure
> scripts; I'm working on that.
> 
>  > Try this:
>  > As root, do 'which latex' to see where it's installed. 
> 
> /usr/share/texmf/bin/latex is a symlink to pdfetex in the same
> directory, also rwxr-xr-x, so it's executable by everybody.  Just to
> remind you, I issed "make dvi" as root.

I'm not familiar with Slackware, but that seems an awfully unusual place
for the executable and likely why it is not being found (ie. it is not
in $PATH).

On my FC6 system:

[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ which latex
/usr/bin/latex

[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ ls -l /usr/bin/latex
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Nov  8 16:12 /usr/bin/latex -> pdfetex

[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ ls -l /usr/bin/pdfetex
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1063840 Oct  1 17:11 /usr/bin/pdfetex


HTH,

Marc Schwartz