LaTeX on Ubuntu

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

Hi,

Any LaTeX/Ubuntu users here? I have a stupid problem that I have spent way
too much time researching, and all I see is that years ago there was at
least one related bug open 
that was never resolved, apparently because people found workarounds in
situations much simpler than mine, and the maintainers didn't bother.

I have a bunch of fairly sophisticated LaTeX documents 
that use quite a few things that come from texlive. They are built through
latexmk, everything works perfectly fine on Red Hat systems, including
CentOS and Fedora.

I have a target build platform that is


U
buntu 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-29-generic x86_64)
.


Everything needed is installed (the various texlive packages, latexmk, all
that it uses
, etc.). It will become obvious in a few moments what makes me so sure.

What does not work is that no cls or sty files are found. The first thing
that throws an error is

! LaTeX Error: File `article.cls' not found.

(obviously, triggered by \documentclass{article}). Yes, the file exists in
the expected place. The fact that it is not found without extra effort
means that something is seriously wrong. If I add the directory where
article.cls lives the same error is through by the first \usepackage{}
statement, etc.

Oh, kpsewhich and kpsewhere do not find article.cls or anything else.

Obviously, I ran (as root/sudo) texhash, mktexlsr, update-texmf, and
everything else I could think of. They all run fine. E.g., texhash creates
ls-R, ls-R-TEXLIVE, ls-R-TEXMFMAIN, etc. under /var/lib/texmf, update-texmf
regenerates /etc/texmf.cnf, and so on. No relief.

I purged and reinstalled texlive - nothing helped.

I got desperate and ran

$ export TEXINPUTS=$(ls -R /usr/share/tex* | awk '/^\/.+:$/ {printf
"%s",$0}').

(including the final dot - for some reason pdflatex did not find files in
the working directory, either). If you don't follow, this adds every single
TeX package directory under /usr/share to the TEXINPUTS environment
variable, which is the path where LaTeX looks for anything it needs.

After this, everything worked.

May I vent now? IT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO WORK LIKE THIS!!! Pheewww...

I should not need to put every bloody package directory into my TEXINPUTS.
There has got to be a better way.

Lots of Google hits on Ubuntu forums with complaints about similar
problems, but no solution (at least none that worked for me).

Has anyone here encountered this problem? Solved it? Any ideas?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org
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