Latex on Silverblue: texconfig

Project Discussion
1

Latex fails on Silverblue. If you run “sudo texconfig rehash” in order to build the necessary latex.fmt file in your homedir, latex also tries to write into /usr/share/texlive - which is impossible of course with Silverblue.

[fansari@bat pdftex]$ sudo texconfig rehash
mktexlsr: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-config: directory not writable. Skipping…
mktexlsr: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist: directory not writable. Skipping…
mktexlsr: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-local//: directory not writable. Skipping…
mktexlsr: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-var: directory not writable. Skipping…
mktexlsr: Done.

I had to remount /usr writeable in order to build the latex.fmt file.

How will this be fixed?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1651282

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2

I would mount in your working directory to a container, install latex into the container, and build the files in the container.

When the build is finished, you should be able to shuffle any necessary files from the container to your working directory.

Something like this:

$ podman run -it -v $PWD:/host registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:29
(container) $ dnf -y install /usr/bin/texconfig
(container) $ cd /host
(container) $ texconfig rehash
(container) $ cp <generated files> /host
(container) $ exit
$ ls $PWD
<generated files>
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3

Would it not be a place to use fedora-toolbox as well? Just asking.

4

Yes, you are probably right. I’ve not tried to use the toolbox yet, but this seems like it would be a good use case.

5

I have used the fedora-toolbox in testing with Intellij IDEA IDE, and Oracle’s Java 9, 10, and 11 along with OpenJDK 8. With it I was able to successfully build one of my earlier Java 1.8 projects, with no/minimal problems. The beauty of this approach was of course the flexibility of using dnf to install the missing bits. Familiarity it seems, trumps all.

6

Hmm this is very unfortunate, because it still happens in Fedora 32 Silverblue.

Especially if we want to use TextStudio using a container or so simply is not possible.

The workaround mentioned in the issue by editing /etc/texlive/web2c/texmf.cnf also did not work for me. texconfig rehash still tries to search for the files in /usr/share/texlive/.

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7

Still happens on Fedora Silverblue 39. Stumbled upon it when tried to fix an error I get when I run pandoc -i input.md -o output.pdf.

Can we somehow permanently move tex configs & caches to /var/etc?

8

Can we somehow permanently move tex configs & caches to /var/etc?

Uh, /etc is not symlinked from /var/etc it is actually in /etc.
Perhaps you could post your question on ask.fp.o instead of bumping this very old topic, even if there is a relationship in problems, ie latex.

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