I'm a linux user, but I have students who have this thing called MS Windows. I've not heard of that system before, I pretended to the students that they were using some weird, minority operating system :). I noticee Lyx 1.6.1 had an installer for that Windoze thing. We installed the lyx bundle that has MixTeX included with it, not the alternative Windows installer, but the one from the LyX team itself.
As far as I can tell, that bundle already has ghostscript and python inside the MikTeX part. Is that correct? When I installed the bundle, I did not change settings, except I removed the spaces from the proposed paths, i.e., it went into c:\ProgramFiles\Lyx161 and so forth. After making the install, we start LyX and there is the usual long delay while additional LaTeX packages are downloaded. I've done this on 4 different systems, all seem to be Windows XP, but I don't know which Service Pack is applied. The systems do not all work in the same way. 2 especiall peculiar things have happened so far. 1. On some systems, spaces in directory structure of LyX document causes view to bomb. On 2 of the student systems, when we try to view a LyX file, we get a window popping up saying spaces in file names are not allowed. If I move the user's lyx files to c:\whatever, then LyX does work. I understand that, I think, because spaces in directories & file names are bad. Generally. However, I made the exact same install on another Windows XP system while I was standing in front of the class. Guess What? The LyX default structure was the same a before, C:\Documents and Settings\whatever\whatever . LyX Created "newfile.lyx" in there, and I was saying to the class "Now this view will fail because of spaces in the file name," and after I hit View/PDF(pdflatex), guess what happened? The pdf file popped up on the screen. Why would it work on one system and not another? How is LyX/LaTeX dealing with spaces? As far as I know, no previous version of LyX was ever installed on these systems. 2. I wanted to view an eps file that R produced on one of these systems. From looking at the MikTeX install, it appears to me that the bundle included ghostscript and python. Yes? I got that idea from reading posts in the Lyx-help list about the windows installer bundle. A post by Uwe Stohr about a previous version of the LyX installer bundle included a Change log excerpt Installer Changelog: ------------- Version 4.09 - LyX 1.6rc3 (list of current regressions: http://tinyurl.com/yu4the ) (list of current crashes and critical bugs: http://tinyurl.com/653prg) - updated to MiKTeX 2.7 (build 3164) - updated to Python 2.5.2 - updated to Ghostscript 8.63 - updated to ImageMagick 6.4.4-1 ----- After installing LyX, I wanted to install gsview32 so students can view eps files generated from R, but the gsview installer fails, claiming that ghostscript was not installed. But ghostscript is part of the LyX bundle? I don't think latex would be working at all without ghostscript. This made me wonder what the LyX Windows installer is supposed to be doing to the Windows environment. Is it supposed to put LyX and gs and latex and pdflatex and everything else into the PATH variable? I tried to run LyX from a command shell, but the system does not find the executable (I looked in the bin directory to find out the correct exe file name, still no go). So perhaps the gsview32 install fails because it runs "gs" in a shell and doesn't find it in the path. Do you think the LyX installer should add those directories to the path? PJ -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
