Hello Paul, and all the others who gave suugestions as well Thanks for the marvellous level of support - way beyond anything I've ever experienced with commercial software - as well as encouragement. The problem seems to have been the old version of sed, as well as an empty version of textclass.lst that somehow happened elsewhere on the HD as a result either of the installation or of my half-baked attempts to get it right. I now have the opening splash screen and a whole program menu to play with, as well as a free Sunday morning... oh happy day!
Thanks again to all Richard Paul A. Rubin wrote: > 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 > > >
