Description of problem: After installing Fedora 12, normal users can run latex and pdflatex but web applications cannot. Error depends on whether pdflatex or latex is run and is either Can't find 'pdflatex.fmt'! or Can't find 'latex.fmt'! locate pdflatex.fmt shows that the file exists in the users' home directories but not globally in /usr/share/texmf/ and copying the appropriate directories to /usr/share/texmf/web2c/ corrects the problem (after running texhash). Due to standard file permissions, apache cannot create these files. This is a problem because man web applications rely in being able to use latex and pdflatex to generate postscript and pdf files directly. Distributing such software on Fedora then requires additional steps and documentation which was not required in the past when TeTeX was the primary TeX distro. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Entirely Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install apache, TexLive and appropriate packages 2. Verify that latex and pdflatex work from the terminal 3. Create a cgi script that copies a .tex file into /tmp and runs latex or pdflatex on it. Actual results: Errors described above Expected results: that pdflatex or latex would actually generate a .pdf or .dvi respectively. Additional info: The simplest solution would be to modify the install scripts to run fmtutil --all and texhash such that it creates the files in the global /usr/share/texmf/ directory instead of the users directory.
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -q texlive texlive-2007-47.fc12.i686
Also present in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4
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I have not been able to reproduce this in Fedora 13 (but I have only installed clean once and I can't remember if I deliberately tried to reproduce). I believe it was fixed in that version. Feel free to close.