Notices

@TA-t3:

OK. It's almost ready, but after installing the new .deb, the postinstall script does not seem to be executed.

I did as you instructed. I expanded the contents to a folder tmp/ . To have the new installation under /opt, I moved all the files in tmp/usr/ to tmp/opt/ and deleted the folder tmp/usr . Then I edited the following files: tmp/opt/local/teTeX/.path, tmp/DEBIAN/postinstall, and tmp/opt/local/maemotex/070802/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf to point to the new path.

(I actually missed the last one the first time and after installing it, pdflatex couldn't find something.)

Checking the contents of the .deb as you said, I realized there were two symlinks that needed to be recreated to point to the new path, so I recreated them, the files are:
tmp/opt/local/maemotex/070802/texmf/web2c/pdflatex.fmt and tmp/opt/local/maemotex/070802/texmf/web2c/pdftex.pool.

I also updated the md5sums file.

When I tried installing this new version I noticed that the DEBIAN/postinstall script did not run, so /etc/profile was not updated and neither were the tex filename databases (some files called ls-R that are regenerated by running the command texhash), so I did all this manually as root. I have no idea what happened, because I remember that the file /etc/profile was updated after I first installed your version a3.

I also realized that for the local texmf tree, it seems better to create a folder /home/user/texmf which contains symlinks to folders in /home/user/MyDocs/localtexmf/ and one actual file, /home/user/texmf/ls-R , which should be owned by user:users . This file contains the texmf filename database of the local texmf tree. It should updated with the command texhash after any changes to the localtexfm tree.

At this point, pdflatex works fine, and the contents of my localtexmf folder can be updated into the texmf filename database. The only concern is the postinstall file not running when installing. So the contents of /etc/profile that I edited manually will not be removed if the package is uninstalled.

Any ideas? Thanks,

/etc/profile didn't get updated on my N900 with the previous version either, I assumed it was something unknown preventing that so I didn't bother with it - I edited it manually into my local .profile anyway. But the postinstall script did run though. Did you verify that the 'x'-bit was still set after editing the file?
Also, with the symlinks, be careful to either use relative symlinks, or, if you create absolute symlinks, that they are pointing correctly (because 'tmp' and all that won't be there after the install of course)

It sounds like you're nearly there - as I said above the only thing I can think of would be a missinge execute bit on the postinstall script. After installation you can always check with ls -l /var/lib/dpkg/info/maemotex.postinstall

edit:
Two more things:
1: Most packages use 'postinst', not 'postinstall' - I don't know if it makes any difference.
2: To do stuff when you un-install a package (like re-updating /etc/profile) you'll have to add a postrm script as well.

Any news on maemotex? I've been following this thread closely and would love to have latex ( incl. beamer and perhaps xelatex) on my n900

I just started using Lyx for a book I am thinking about writing. Would Maemotex be able to open Lyx files?

HI, I have maemotex with beamer working on my N900, but
I am still learning to package things into a .deb file.
I will try again this weekend and I can share my experiences with you.

I'm also trying to get gnuplot and octave working.

Cheers,

It's more the other way round: The editor Lyx uses LaTeX and maemotex is a slimed-down version of latex for maemo. There is no native Lyx for maemo (and I doubt there will ever be) and no other editor can use Lyx files (you can always export Lyx->LaTeX, but I guess that's not what you want.

But you can use Easy Debian and install Lyx there. It won't be optimized for the small screen and compiling might take some time but I guess it should be pretty usable. Easy Debian is in extras now and to install Lyx just use from the easy debian command line.

I kept earing about easy debian, but had not stopped to check it out. OK, this sounds very cool, but it doesn't seem to be in extras. Was it removed?

Then it's in extras-testing. Sorry, I thought it had already been promoted.

Is it optified?

It is in a way: the chroot- and easy packages are very small. However you need to install a big rootfs image file of about 2GB. You can put this wherever you like, it's installed to MyDocs by default so the root directory is not used for that.