[tex-live] problems installing TL08 on WinXP

[George N. White III]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Maxwell, Adam R <adam.maxwell at pnl.gov> wrote:

> I tried using the bootstrap installer as recommended by this page:
>
> http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/tldev/README
>
> to install TL 2008 on a Windows XP Pro system, but the install fails.  It
> looks like none of the formats are created, and manual attempts to run
> updmap-sys or tlmgr from the Windows shell result in " No appropriate script
> found." messages.  Log file attached.
>
> I first tried a medium install with some additional packages added via the
> installer GUI, then tried a full install with the same results.  Let me know
> if I can provide additional info; using Windows is not my forte.  I'm using
> TL08 on Mac OS X, and was hoping to get a Windows-using colleague to use it
> as well.

Did your colleague have some other version of TeX installed?  There may be
some environment variables that conflict with the new version.  I see that the
install directory is "C:\Program Files\\texlive\2008\bin\win32".  While this
should work, I think some ConTeXt tools have problems with the space in
the path, so I used F:\texlive\2008 for my own (more successful) testing.

The problems appear to start with:

[...]
running mktexlsr C:/Program Files/texlive/2008/texmf-var
running updmap-sys... updmap.bat: updmap: No appropriate script found.
done
re-running mktexlsr C:/Program Files/texlive/2008/texmf-var
[...]

After this the installer attempts to create formats, but the input files
also aren't found.   Maybe the ls-R files were't really generated, or
there is a problem with searching those files, so

1.  are the ls-R files being created properly?

2.  if so, does kpsewhich find files:

It might be useful to peek into the ls-R files to
see if they look like the ones on a working installation.  What
happens if you run "mktexlsr" from the command line?   Try,
e.g.:

  ----------------------------------------------------------
F:\TeXLive\2008\bin\win32>mktexlsr --help
Usage: mktexlsr [--quiet|--silent] [DIRS ...]

Rebuild all necessary ls-R filename databases completely. If one or
more arguments DIRS are given, these are used as texmf directories to
build ls-R for. Else all directories in the search path for ls-R files
($TEXMFDBS) are used.
   ---------------------------------------------------------

The try, e.g.,:
  -------------------------------------------------------
F:\TeXLive\2008\bin\win32>kpsewhich story.tex
f:/TeXLive/2008/texmf-dist/tex/plain/base/story.tex
  -------------------------------------------------------

There are extensive debugging options for kpsewhich,
but first check for environment variables such as
TEXINPUTS that may conflict.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia