[XeTeX] Linux setup question (no xetex.fmt file found)

[Ralf Stubner]

Dennis Drescher <dennis_drescher at sil.org> writes:

> I did the first one (sudo -H texhash), the output seemed right. BTW, 
> what is the -H for on sudo?

See the sudo man page.

> On the second one (texhash) everything failed due to permission issues 
> plus my home directory /home/dennis/.texmf-var/web2c wasn't even listed 
> in the output so it didn't touch that. It would seem that I have to run 
> it with the directory specified. Does that make sense or am I still 
> missing something?

It is indeed so that the ls-R files in TEXMFVAR=$HOME/.texmf-var is not
updated with mktexlsr. However, for a beginner like you it is not really
a good idea to have format files somewhere below $HOME. It is better to
have things installed in the system-wide trees TEXMFLOCAL =
/usr/local/share/texmf (.pool, .sty, ...) and TEXMFSYSVAR =
/var/lib/texmf (.fmt). Format files there are generated with fmtutil-sys
and appropriate entries in fmtutil.cnf via files in /etc/texmf/fmt.d.
Here: 

~$ cat /etc/texmf/fmt.d/10xetex.cnf 
# XeTeX formats
xetex   xetex   -       *xetex.ini
xelatex xetex   language.dat    *xelatex.ini


cheerio
ralf