I’ve been trying to get a working distribution of texlive (specifically pdflatex) installed, but it keeps spitting out the same errors.
I’ve not really worked with dnf before, but I assume I want the texlive-scheme-full package which should install everything to do with tex processing. I’m on a fresh install of OpenMandriva Rome.
$ dnf list --installed | grep texlive-scheme
texlive-scheme-full.noarch 54074-4 @rolling-x86_64
$ cat main.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, World!
\end{document}
$ pdflatex main.tex 2> err_log.txt
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.26 (TeX Live 2024/OpenMandriva) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
restricted \write18 enabled.
I can't find the format file `pdflatex.fmt'!
For posterity, I’ve also gone through most links online and nothing has worked.
The majority (if not all) proposed solutions are detailed in this open-since-2016 issue, which I doubt is the cause because I’ve had latex working on my Arch Linux system a few days ago before switching XD
Works perfectly here, pdflatex.fmt is autogenerated.
Looking at your error log:
EC German hyphenation patterns (traditional orthography)
! I can't find file `dehypht.tex'.
l.29 \input dehypht.tex
Not sure why German hyphenation would be required for an English document (I’m not the biggest TeX expert in the world, but I know the basics), but it looks like it is.
Try dnf install texlive-dehyph
I could not get pandoc or pdflatex to work from the texlive installed from the repos in OpenMandriva Lx. I spent hours trying everything I could find searching the Internet and Linux forums to get pdflatex to work using the TeXLive distribution in the OM repo. Nothing worked. Here’s what I did. I uninstalled and removed all previous TeXLive attempts and installed TeXLive from Quick install - TeX Live - TeX Users Group
Unpack the zipped file: install-tl-unx.tar.gz
Run the install-tl perl script from within the unpacked folder:
perl ./install-tl --no-interaction
Took a looooong time.
Add the TeXLive location to $PATH by adding the following to .bashrc: export PATH="/usr/local/texlive/2024/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH"
And then source the .bashrc to update the PATH source ~/.bashrc
Now pdflatex works and so does generating a pdf with pandoc:
Example: pandoc -o alice.pdf alice.md
It seems like the steps that you tried to get it working could be helpful for fixing it in the repos. Would you mind sharing that here or in the GH issue? If we already have something in the repos and it doesn’t work, we would prefer to get that fixed before offering a workaround like this, to the extent possible. It might be a solution, but it probably isn’t the solution to this issue.
I’m not sure my approach to solving the problem is appropriate. I essentially said that the OM install is terribly broken, toss it out and go directly to the upstream source. I don’t know why it worked. Heck I don’t even know what the underlying problem is/was.
I have an extra laptop that has OpenMandriva Rome installed, but does not have texlive installed. I’ll install texlive (from the repo) on it tomorrow and will dig as much as my limited skill set will allow. Now that I have a working system on a desktop I’ll have something to use as a comparison. Maybe I’ll get lucky.
Follow-up attempts to solve the conundrum that is OpenMandriva TeXLive.
I’ve spent most of today trying to get TeXLive to work properly on a virgin OpenMandriva Lx Rome laptop with zero success. In trying to get pdflatex to work I was faced with obstacle after obstacle. Every time one module was installed to correct a problem, a new problem surfaced. The OpenMandriva installation does not match the installation environment from the official TUG release of TeXLive. Directories are not named the same and modules/binaries are placed in different places. This might work for simple TeX usage, but breaks when more complicated tasks are attempted (e.g. pdflatex and Pandoc). TeX is a complicated system of a few thousand modules that follow a strict set of rules/scheme when calling and using the many parts. This scheme is broken on OpenMandriva TeXLive.
I now officially admit defeat. I really wanted to make this work. Someone else may discover a simple and easy fix, I hope so.
My advice for now is to skip the TeXLive version in the repo, bite the bullet and install the full(?) version from the TUG website.
So, it sounds like there are some hardcoded paths.
For additional context, we make an attempt when packaging to reduce bloat. Sometimes that can lead to things like this. We will probably need to revise the package so it is closer to the upstream experience. Thank you for your help.
There really can’t be anything seriously wrong with OM texlive packaging, since our build system uses pdflatex to build documentation for various packages and it always succeeds (and the build system can’t install anything but OM packages). This is almost certainly just a simple missing dependency somewhere, probably the texlive-dehyph one I pointed out earlier.
That said, texlive packaging is a bit of a mess, it probably would make sense to find a way to automatically convert the tlpkg dependency information into rpms to make sure we don’t have to hunt down dependencies like texlive-dehyph manually.
pandoc is a different matter altogether - we can’t currently package it because it’s written in haskell, we don’t have the ghc haskell compiler packaged, and it requires itself to build, resulting in a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem that we have to solve. (Our packages are always built from source, we don’t just repackage 3rd party binaries except in the non-free repo).
