[R] ERROR: 'latex' needed but missing on your system.

[Marc Schwartz]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 10:56 -0400, Joel J. Adamson wrote:
> Marc Schwartz writes:
>  > 
>  > I'm not familiar with Slackware, but that seems an awfully unusual place
>  > for the executable and likely why it is not being found (ie. it is not
>  > in $PATH).
> 
> I agree, that is weird, however as I stated in my original post, that
> directory is in everybody's path (users and root).  As I've also said,
> I have the same tetex set up with the same directories in another
> distro (PCLinuxOS) and "make dvi" worked flawlessly there.  
> 
> Do I need export the path, or edit the Makefile to include
> /usr/share/texmf/bin?
> 
> Thanks,
> Joel

My first inclination, which I just noted Peter also referenced, would be
to ensure that your build shell environment includes that directory in
your $PATH.

In an open console session (where you are going to build R), use:

  PATH=$PATH:/usr/share/texmf/bin
  export PATH

and then try building to see what happens.  Note that the above will be
temporary and will be lost once you close that console session.

I would check the system and user specific bashrc, .bashrc
and .bash_profile files on the PCLinuxOS system to see if that directory
is included in the $PATH on that system.  There may be an idiosyncratic
difference between the two linux distros.

HTH,

Marc