2015-02-12 14:28 GMT+01:00, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com:
On Wed, 11 Feb 2015 23:24:40 +0100 Andras Simon szajmi@gmail.com wrote:
I've been using LaTeX on a fully updated Fedora 21, but now suddenly even TeXing the simplest plain TeX file produces this:
warning: kpathsea: /usr/share/texlive/texmf-config/ls-R: No usable entries in ls-R. warning: kpathsea: See the manual for how to generate ls-R.
// Rule number one for anything TeX-related: before you proceed, make sure that you understand what is going on. ;-) //
Yep, that's why I never proceed :-)
The warning messages are pretty clear: kpathsea is telling you that the ls-R database is empty or corrupted, and that it should be regenerated. It also suggests that you look into the manual about how to regenerate the database.
The easiest way to find the relevant man page is this:
$ apropos ls-R mktexlsr (1) - create ls-R databases texhash (1) - create ls-R databases
These two man pages actually both point to the mktexlsr man page, which tells you how to use it to regenerate the ls-R database. In short, you need to log in as root, and invoke mktexlsr with no arguments, like this:
# mktexlsr mktexlsr: Updating /usr/share/texlive/texmf-config/ls-R... mktexlsr: Updating /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/ls-R... mktexlsr: Updating /usr/share/texlive/texmf-local///ls-R... mktexlsr: Updating /usr/share/texlive/texmf-var/ls-R... mktexlsr: Done.
Hopefully that should regenerate the ls-R database on your system, making kpathsea happy.
By the way, the ls-R database is the list of full paths of all TeX-related files. A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away it used to be generated manually by executing the command "ls -R" for a given directory and putting the result in the (creatively named) ls-R file, which kpathsea could search through and inform TeX where in the directory tree it can find the file it needs. Today, the database is generated by the elaborate bash script (do a "less /usr/bin/mktexlsr" to see the details), but it still boils down to going to the appropriate directory and taking the output of "ls -R".
Finally, all four ls-R databases which I have above are ASCII files, literally the output of "ls -R" for the appropriate directory, with a couple of lines appended at the beginning. So the fact that you have binary files there smells to me like something being very wrong with your files, probably due to the corrupted filesystem you had to deal with before.
Thanks for all this information. I ended up following another Fedoran's suggestion, and erased/reinstalled all texlive packages. (Plain dnf reinstall, which I had tried before, was not enough.)
Andras