Rene Maya wrote:
Hi there,
Well I've been reading/studying the guides that come together with Lyx, and
so far I think it's a great piece of software, there is a but, though, not
only I'm a newbie to Lyx but also to Linux, specifically to Kubuntu. and I
found really hard to keep up how to install and set up everything, the worst
part is that you don't even bother saying it! you go as far as saying
something like "in this tutorial we are going to assume that Lyx is working
perfectly (why would it?) as well as LaTeX, xdvi, dvips" and then you say
that if this is not the case then I'll have to do it by myself (!?).
This is supposed to be handled for you by Kubuntu: When you install LyX,
the Kubuntu package manager should install everything that is necessary
to get LyX working correctly. If it's not doing that, then that is a
problem with Kubuntu, not with LyX.
I believe that stuff like this is what pushes people away from using great
open source software... specially newbies like me. I know... we can always
google anything but it seems that even though there is an official website
for dvips, you can't download it from them, it only says "download reliable
TeX software, it should be included there"... why don't you include
everything that Lyx needs to be perfect??
First, because there isn't actually such a thing. Take TeX for example.
There are many "distributions" of TeX, and on Linux there are two that
are very widely used: tetex, which is actually unmaintained now but is
still used in Fedora 8, and TeXLive, which is found in many new
distributions. You might have had one of these installed before LyX was
installed, in which case LyX doesn't need to install TeX, and in fact
doing so might mess up your existing installation. Moreover, as Helge
often likes to point out, you don't need TeX installed at all to use
LyX, if all you want to do is edit files and not view or print them.
(That might seem like a weird thing to want to do, but suppose you have
an old laptop and underpowered you carry around when you travel. It's
not your main machine.) And you don't actually need xdvi, or dvips. You
can use kdvi to view DVI files, and you only need dvips to generate
PostScript. So maybe you don't want those. Etc, etc, etc.
But the more important thing, again, is that these are issues that,
under the Linux model, are supposed to be handled by distributions, like
Kubuntu. We just write LyX, and it is again part of the Linux model that
we are allowed to assume that users will have the other pieces needed to
make the software work. Getting those other pieces is up to you---but,
in reality, up to your distribution. So you ought to have been able to
download LyX from the Kubuntu package manager---or do apt-get install
lyx from a terminal---and have everything that you needed. If not, file
a bug with them.
then there seems to be a way to
link all these pieces of software, that is, make them work together, but
never mention how to do that...
I'm not sure what you mean here.
Now regarding exporting and printing... in every single document I've made
with Lyx.... If I try to do one or the other a message like this pops up...
\makeatother
The control sequence at the end of the top line
of your error message was never \def'ed. If you have
misspelled it (e.g., `\hobx'), type `I' and the correct
spelling (e.g., `I\hbox'). Otherwise just continue,
and I'll forget about whatever was undefined.
Do you get this message when you View>DVI?
rh
