PEBKAC 2008 ;) [was: Re: Stupid Ubuntu 8.10]

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 05:18 -0500, vafa at aol.com.au wrote:
> for example if you copy a directory (which contains fonts)
> to /usr/share/fonts/truetype by the command:
> 
> sudo cp -r fontsdirname  /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Hmmm, it probably has nothing to do with the issue you experience, and I
am everything but an expert in fonts, but in general /usr is the domain
of the package manager. Wouldn't it be wiser to
use /usr/local/share/fonts/ ?

> then those fonts will not appear in openoffice. 

I thought we were talking about TeX? Doesn't TeX have a completely
independent font system? I thought so, but who knows, maybe that has
changed.

> I did not have this problem in Ubuntu 8.04. And if you know look
> at /usr/share/fonts/truetype you see the directory that you have
> copied but it is ``unreadable''.

What does "unreadable" mean? What to you use to look
at /usr/share/fonts/truetype, and what tells you about the dir being
"unreadable"

Is it possible that the copy has a permission problem? I notice that you
use "cp -r", which does not preserver the original ownerships and modes.
For that, you need "cp -rp":

       -p     same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps

       --preserve[=ATTR_LIST]
              preserve the specified attributes (default: 	
              mode,ownership,timestamps), if possible
              additional attributes: context, links, all

What is the output of "ls -l /usr/share/fonts/truetype" and 
"ls -l /usr/share/fonts/truetype/*"?

> It is necessary most of the times to copy directories and files to the
> root directory where TeX is installed. Ubuntu 8.04 had no problem.

I am a TeX expert even less than a fonts expert, but why is your TeX
installed in root? Why do you not use the TeX Live collection that is
part of Ubuntu? E.g., 

aptitude show texlive
Package: texlive
State: not installed
Version: 2007.dfsg.1-2
Priority: optional
Section: tex
Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers
<ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com>
Uncompressed Size: 123k
Depends: texlive-fonts-recommended (>= 2007-11),
texlive-latex-recommended (>= 2007-11), texlive-latex-base (>= 2007-11)
Suggests: texlive-doc-en
Description: TeX Live: A decent selection of the TeX Live packages
The TeX Live software distribution offers a complete TeX system. It
encompasses programs for typesetting, previewing and printing of TeX
documents in many different languages, and a large collection of TeX
macros and font libraries. 
 
This metapackage provides a decent selection of the TeX Live packages
which should suffice for the most common tasks. 
 
The distribution also includes extensive general documentation about
TeX, as well as the documentation accompanying the included software
packages.
Homepage: http://www.tug.org/texlive