[tex-live] trouble starting context on latest tl2008 developer snapshot

Taco Hoekwater taco at elvenkind.com
Mon Jul 7 16:42:41 CEST 2008



Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Mo, 07 Jul 2008, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
>> I will sort this out and report back.
> 

I had somewhat different results here, but indeed it took a little
bit of effort to get context + luatex running. I fear someone else
will have to fix the installer, I don't know where to look / what to
do, sorry. There is not much to be done, afaics.


A step-by-step account:

I ran the networked installer in a virtual box running suse 11, and
initially, my virtual box screen size was 800x600. That does not
combine with the -gui option of install-tl: the Tk window simply
doesn't display the bottom part of the installation screen.

This was not a big problem, I just made the vbox larger and I doubt
people with real hardware have such tiny screens these days. I also
understand that such small displays are not supported, but still:
maybe it would be better to give a message and abort or fall back
to the non-gui version instead of drawing a useless window?

I first installed the 'texlive scheme for context', and later a 'texlive
full' as well. In both cases, the download and installation went fine,
no problems at all. It looks like the 'context' scheme installs a fair
number of packages that are not actually needed by context users, but
that is mostly cosmetics (it is not that much in actual bytes, and I
only noticed because I know rather precisely how much should be enough).

After installation was complete, I had to fiddle a bit to get the
binaries included in the path, I am not sure whether that is supposed
to be handled by the installer or not?

In any case, after adjusting $PATH

   texexec test
and
   texexec --xtx test

both ran out of the box, excellent! This is already better than ever.
(test.tex is just a small test file I created on the spot, 'hello
world'-ish)

However, context+luatex did not run. The problem was that the
installation does not create the link for "mtxrun" in the binaries
directory, so I had to do that manually. It did create the other
two script links ("context" and "luatools"), only "mtxrun" was missing.
But "context" is a shell wrapper that runs "mtxrun -script context",
so the "context" command was broken as well.  I just copied "luatools"
to "mtxrun" and edited it to change luatools.lua into mtxrun.lua, that
was good enough.

There is a bit of post-install work that is needed for context+luatex 
that is not done by the installer, I ran those two commands by hand:

First
   luatools --generate
(this sets up the texmf cache)

Second
   context --make --compile cont-en
(this creates the format inside said cache)

after that, "context test" ran ok. No need to change anything in
the texmf.cnf or set up any environment variable whatsoever, just
those two commands.

Jesse, can you please try my recipe to make sure I got it right?

Best wishes,
Taco



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