[tex-k] note from Don Knuth

[Julian Gilbey]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 03:24:19PM -0800, Maggie McLoughlin wrote:
> Dear Karl,
> 
> Help! I'm really stymied this time.
> [...]
> It seems that their version of teTeX (and Debian's too,

Thomas Esser stopped maintaining teTeX a year or two ago - I would
strongly recommend switching to the actively maintained texlive
packages (which were originally in sync with teTeX and have now taken
over as the major supported system for Linux et al).

> The problem is that the blasted system can't find
> the file "fmtutil.cnf", although it clearly exists.

> ~[3]> locate fmtutil.cnf
> /usr/share/tetex-bin/fmtutil.cnf

> ~[4]> cat /var/lib/texmf/ls-R
> [...]
> ./web2c:
> fmtutil.cnf

There is something very, very strange here.

Simplest way out might be to:
 mv /usr/share/tetex-bin/fmtutil.cnf /usr/share/tetex-bin/web2c/fmtutil.cnf

A better long-term solution would probably be to use aptitude or
apt-get to purge (not simply remove) everything tetex-* related, and
then do a clean install of relevant texlive-* packages, followed by
the very minor personal configuration needed.

Hope this helps,

   Julian