Richard Brown wrote:
Thanks for your reply. I didn't intervene in the directory structure at
all as far as I remember, but anyway I renamed the directory where it
was, and ran the installation .exe again. (This was
lyx-1.3.5-win32-nc.exe) with the following result: in C: I now have
C:\lyx
which contains bin, lib, man, share, tmp directories. I did nothing- the
exe did this.
This looks fine.
The C:\lyx\bin subdirectory contains the lyx.exe program.
In the c:\lyx\share subdirectory I find 2 more sub-subdirectories, one
called locale (which seems to have a lot of other language stuff) and
another called lyx (so this is c:\lyx\share\lyx ) which has packages.lst
and textclass.lst files in. Neither is empty. The first four lines of
textclass.lst are typical of the rest, and look like this-:
"IEEEtran" "IEEEtran" "article (IEEEtran)" "true"
"aa" "aa" "article (A&A)" "false"
"aapaper" "aa" "article (A&A V4)" "false"
"aastex" "aastex" "article (AASTeX)" "true"
This is as it should be.
When I run lyx, I still get the same error. I tried copying lyx.exe to
the same directory as the textclass.lst files, and it was just the same.
I tried copying the entire contents of the c:\lyx\share\lyx subdirectory
to teh same place as the lyx.exe (ie, C:\lyx\bin) and it made no
difference. The error still says
LyX wasn’t able to find any layout description
Check the contents of the file “textclass.lst”
Sorry, has to exit
I'm way out of my depth here. Thanks for any help you may be able to give.
Richard
The error message typically occurs when either textclass.lst does not
exist (anywhere) or textclass.lst exists but has length zero bytes (and
*that* typically happens as a result of a problem with the configuration
script). Now, if there's no textclass.lst in the directory where LyX
starts (which is not necessarily the bin directory), then LyX should
find the copy in lyx\share\lyx and start ok (I just verified this on my
laptop). On the other hand, if you have a zero-length copy in the
startup directory and a valid copy in lyx\share\lyx, you get the error
(also just verified). So my best guess is that there is in fact a zero
byte version sitting around somewhere.
So here are a couple of things to try:
1. Search your PC for all copies of textclass.lst (either using the
Windows search utility or by opening a command window and typing 'dir
c:\textclass.lst /s'), and see if any copies with length zero show up.
That will help pin down where LyX is starting, if in fact we find one.
2. Create a starting document directory (for instance, c:\lyx\work),
copy the textclass.lst and paste the copy in there. While you're at it,
copy packages.lst, clsfiles.lst, styfiles.lst and lyxrc.default from
lyx\share\lyx into the work directory as well. (Not all of those may
exist -- some are created by a successful configuration run, and I'm
still not sure whether you've had one.) Now create a shortcut to the
lyx.exe file (you can right-click it in Win Explorer and create the
shortcut from the context menu that pops up). Now right-click the
shortcut, choose Properties, and on the Shortcut tab set the target and
startup entries as follows:
Target: C:\lyx\bin\lyx.exe -userdir c:\lyx\work
Start in: C;\lyx\bin
(the second one should already be filled in correctly, but just to be
sure ...). Click ok and then try to start LyX by double-clicking the
shortcut. Does that help?
One other thing to check: open a command prompt in c:\lyx\bin and type
'sed --version'. If the version number starts with a 3, you're using
the copy of sed that came with the LyX installer, and it's known to fail
in a way that leaves a zero-length textclass.lst. There's a tip on the
Wiki about where to find a more recent copy of sed. Note that what you
download when you follow the link from the Wiki is an *installer* that
has to be run to install sed. (Some people have gotten confused and
thought they were downloading sed.exe itself.)
Let us know what transpires.
-- Paul
