[LON-CAPA-admin] Prepare printable document stalling on 2.8.1 / fedora 9

[loncapa_admin]

Stuart,

Thank you very much.  I just ran those two commands and the pdf generation seems to have been restored (whew!  Every time there's a glitch, I get nervous about it being architecture-dependent).

So, the immediate problem is solved.  fmtutil did, however, cough up some error messages :

`xetex -ini  -jobname=xetex -progname=xetex -etex xetex.ini' failed
`xetex -ini  -jobname=xelatex -progname=xelatex -etex xelatex.ini' failed
`pdftex -ini  -jobname=mptopdf -progname=context -translate-file=cp227.tcx mptopdf.tex' failed

are these anything to be concerned about (if I understand correctly, LON-CAPA doesn't use xetex or pdftex directly, so maybe this isn't a problem?).

Many thanks again,

Michael Dugdale
Department of Physics
John Abbott College
21275 Lakeshore Road
Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Québec
H9X 3L9

(514) 457-6610 X 5888
loncapa_admin at johnabbott.qc.ca
________________________________________
From: lon-capa-admin-admin at mail.lon-capa.org [lon-capa-admin-admin at mail.lon-capa.org] On Behalf Of Stuart Raeburn [raeburn at msu.edu]
Sent: August 23, 2009 15:19
To: lon-capa-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
Subject: Re: [LON-CAPA-admin] Prepare printable document stalling on 2.8.1      / fedora 9

Michael,

This seems to be a TeX issue specific to Fedora 9 (which uses the
TeXLive packaging of TeX instead of tetex (which had been used for
other supported distros).  In printout.pl it appears that running the
latex command over the .tex file to generate the .dvi was failing.

Running:

/usr/bin/texconfig rehash

then

/usr/bin/fmtutil-sys --missing

fixed this issue for me on a Fedora 9 test installation.  Afterwards
printout.pl would generate the dvi (and ultimately the PDF).

It is possible that the rehash alone would fix the problem (I didn't
test again after just the first step).

Investigations continue ...


Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group

Quoting loncapa_admin <loncapa_admin at johnabbott.qc.ca>:

> Hello, I was wondering if this is just a local problem, or if others
>  have seen the same behaviour.
>
> I upgraded our servers to loncapa 2.8.1 just after our semester
> ended in May.  Before then, we had been running 2.8.0 with no
> printing problems.  Since then, our servers were under pretty light
> load and it's possible the  "Prepare a printable document" feature
> wasn't tested.
>
> I've just received a message from one of our teachers stating that
> the "Prepare printable documents" feature wasn't working.  I've
> since tried it myself and can confirm that it's stalling on "Class
> Print Status: for Michael T Dugdale now LaTeXing file,  bytes
> generated."  That's it, no byte count... the page never refreshes.
>
> Under /var/log/httpd/errorlog, I'm getting:
> "[Sun Aug 23 12:31:26 2009] [error] [client 96.23.67.210] Couldn't
> open log file
> /home/httpd/prtspool/michaeldugdale_johnabbott_printout_1251045083_6544_1.log for reading: No such file or directory, referer:
> http://kepler.johnabbott.qc.ca/adm/printout"
>
> Checking the *errors logs in /home/httpd/perls/logs, I'm not seeing
> anything, nor in any other logs under /var/log.
>
> Looking in /home/httpd/prtspool, I can see that the .tex file is
> being generated.  Interestingly enough, if I manually latex the file
>  (thus producing the associated .dvi, .aux and .log files) in
> /home/httpd/prtspool/ and then refresh the browser page, the
> printable pdf is produced correctly.
>
> So it seems that the tex file is produced correctly, and the dvips
> -> pstopdf chain is working correctly, but not the first call to
> latex.
>
>
> Has anyone else seen such behaviour in 2.8.1, or is this a purely
> local problem?  Any thoughts would be appreciated.
>
> Many thanks!
>
>
> Michael Dugdale
> Department of Physics
> John Abbott College
> 21275 Lakeshore Road
> Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Québec
> H9X 3L9
>
> (514) 457-6610 X 5888
> loncapa_admin at johnabbott.qc.ca
>
> _______________________________________________
> LON-CAPA-admin mailing list
> LON-CAPA-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
> http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/listinfo/lon-capa-admin
>



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