[R] ERROR: 'latex' needed but missing on your system.

[Gad Abraham]

Joel J. Adamson wrote:
> After successfully building R on Slackware Linux v11.0 I went to make
> the documentation; the texi files went fine and then I hopefully issued
> 
> make dvi
> 
> after having gotten the warning to the effect of "You cannot build the
> DVI or PDF manuals" during compilation.  And, as expected I got the
> error
> 
> ERROR: 'latex' needed but missing on your system.
> 
> The problem is that latex is on my system and is in root's path:
> 
> /usr/src/R-2.4.1 Super-User > echo $PATH
> /usr/share/texmf/bin/:/opt/kde/bin/:/uCsr/local/stata{sic}:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
> 
> I can issue latex from the command line as root (su'd to root, that
> is) and it will run successfully.  Also, "whereis latex" turns up
> empty.

It's a bit strange, because by default files like latex should be 
readable by all users. Did you install latex from source?

Try this:
As root, do 'which latex' to see where it's installed. Make sure that 
the file and directories on its path are readable by your non-root user, 
and that the directory is in the non-root user's path. The file 'latex' 
might also be a symlink to some other file (as is in Ubuntu), so that 
one will also need to be readable.


-- 
Gad Abraham
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
The University of Melbourne
Parkville 3010, Victoria, Australia
email: g.abraham at ms.unimelb.edu.au
web: http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~gabraham