[texhax] TeX Collection
William Lee Valentine
vsc at cnsp.com
Sun Jan 24 01:53:48 CET 2010
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Messieurs et Mesdames:
I am a member of TUG. I received today my TeX Collection DVD from
October 2009. I have installed Protext and MiKTeX, on my machines, from
last year's disc. I was hoping that this year's distribution would
update the one that I have in place. My machines run Windows 2000 and
various distributions of Linux; but I have not settled on a Linux
distribution to use as my primary computing vehicle. I therefore
attempted to install Protext under Windows 2000 as I did last year.
The TeX Collection disc has an autorun.inf file in the root directory,
so Windows 2000 attempted to execute the same when I placed the disc in
my DVD writer. The .inf file instructs Windows to execute
R:/setup/TeXCollection.exe
where R: is the drive letter for my DVD writer. (I here use slashes
where Windows would itself use backslashes.)
Windows ran this program. An error message appeared indicating that the
file
R:/setup/TeXCollection.exe.log
could not be created.
Evidently the program
TeXCollection.exe
attempts to create a log file when it executes. It apparently tries to
create that file in the directory or folder from which the program was
executed. Since the DVD is a read-only medium, that effort will always
fail, as it did for me.
Two options would seem to be available for allowing
TeXCollection.exe
to run from its DVD and to create files as needed.
(1) Ask the user to specify a directory or folder where files can be
created (as, a directory or folder for temporary files). The log file in
question, and any other temporary files that may be required for
successful execution (as, for the expansion of compressed files), could
then be opened in the directory or folder so referenced.
(2) Copy
TeXCollection.exe
to a read/write directory or folder, so that it can create temporary
files as needed. I did this, copying the program to a directory that had
available about 300 megabytes of storage. Execution failed again, as,
evidently, the program looks for the auxiliary file
python25.dll
in the directory from which the program had been executed.
I copied
python25.dll
into the directory where I had copied
TeXCollection.exe
and reexecuted the latter.
The program now failed with the following set of error messages.
L:\tmp\texclctn\TeXCollection.exe.log
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "TeXCollection.py", line 5, in <module>
File "zipextimporter.pyc", line 82, in load_module
File "wx\__init__.pyc", line 45, in <module>
File "zipextimporter.pyc", line 82, in load_module
File "wx_core.pyc", line 4, in <module>
File "zipextimporter.pyc", line 98, in load_module
ImportError: MemoryLoadLibrary failed loading wx\_core_.pyd
I hope that this information will enable you to supply users with an
alternate set of instructions for getting
TeXCollection.exe
to run, at least under Windows 2000.
-- William Lee Valentine
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