LyX installation error- text class not found- 'Reconfigure' or 'use without latex' option coming

Question

I use win-7, 64 bit. I downloaded lyx bundle 2.1.4 packaged along with miktex 2.9. After installation, when I ran the program , a pop-up appears saying- 'lyx: no textclass found'. In detail, it tells- 'lyx will have only basic functionality because no text classes have been found. You can either try to reconfigure Lyx normally, try to reconfigure without checking your latex installation, or continue.'

Lyx opens after this but error messages like- 'document class not found' keep coming up. It seems I cannot save a document prepared on lyx on any format other than .lyx. Lyx itself seems to work properly. Math equation edits seem to function all right. But how do I save a document in a format other than .lyx? Please note that I am new to latex and do not know much yet.

In a lyx tutorial it says you can create PDF by going to document and then view. But the 'view' option in 'document' does not responds at all.

I have tried many things without success. I tried installing basic miktex 2.9 separately before lyx and I also tried installing previous stable versions of lyx. Nothing seems to work. Please help me get lyx working properly.

Edit: I tried reconfiguring but another error message turns up telling me to reconfigure again...

Thank you.

Answer 1

I battled for a complete day with this and could get nowhere, until I found what I believe is the problem. Here's what I did:

1) opened a command prompt in windows with administrative privileges.

2) navigated to the directory containing lyx.exe 'c:\program files (x86)\lyx 2.1\bin' on my machine.

3) executed lyx.exe

4) everything involving python calls failed - reconfigure (which uses configure.py), opening old documents (which uses lyx2lyx), etc.

5) exited lyx back to the command prompt

6) on the command line typed 'set pythonpath=' which clears the pythonpath.

7) on the command line typed 'set path=' which clears the path.

8) typed lyx.exe to reenter lyx

9) now everything works!

I'm not sure of all the pertinent information here, but I'm running windows 10 with a 64 bit python installation. I believe the lyx python calls are trying to run my python installation and not the one that comes with Lyx and here is the problem - the two are incompatible. By clearing the path and the pythonpath, it seems to force Lyx to find the python it installed and everything works.

I hope this helps someone and the Lyx developers.

Answer 2

I had this problem today (Win 8.1-64 bit, Lyx 2.2.2.4), and eventually figured out how to make Lyx start (at least on my machine), so I'm sharing my solution in case it can help:

• Open control panel/system/advanced (or something like that, my windows is localized).
• Create an environment variable named LyxDir pointing to the Lyx installation folder. I choosed to create a system level variable, I suppose a user level one should do.
• Now Lyx should start flawlessly.
• In Lyx, under tools/preferences/paths you can see that "path prefix" makes use of this variable. It seems it had not been set by the installer.

Answer 3

I had this problem with Windows 7-64-bit, MikTeX 2.9 and LyX 2.3.2-2. None of the other answers worked for me. In the end it seems the reason may have been spaces in Windows paths. My observations follow below:

1. Initially I had MikTeX installed in "C:\Program Files" and LyX in "C:\Program Files (x86)". The problem appeared.
2. Uninstalling LyX and reinstalling in "C:\lyx" did not help. The problem remained.
3. Uninstalled both LyX and MikTeX.
4. Installed MikTeX in "C:\miktex".
5. Installed LyX in "C:\lyx". Now LyX started and ran perfectly.

It may be enough to install MikTeX in a space-free path, I have not tested.

Unfortunately, there are lot's of programs that won't run correctly when installed in "C:\Program Files", but work fine in a path without spaces.

Answer 4

In my case the issue belong to the already existing installation on inkscape on my Windows 10.

There is a bug in the function checkInkscape() of the

./Resources/configure.py

script.

def checkInkscape():
''' Check whether Inkscape is available and return the full path (Windows only) '''
''' On Mac OS (darwin) a wrapper is used - therefore the version is checked '''
''' The answer of the real inkscape is validated and a fake binary used if this fails '''
if sys.platform == 'darwin':
    version_string = cmdOutput("inkscape --version")
    match = re.match('^Inkscape', version_string)
    if match:
        return 'inkscape'
    else:
        return 'inkscape-binary'
elif os.name != 'nt':
    return 'inkscape'
if sys.version_info[0] < 3:
    import _winreg as winreg
else:
    import winreg
aReg = winreg.ConnectRegistry(None, winreg.HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT)
try:
    aKey = winreg.OpenKey(aReg, r"inkscape.svg\DefaultIcon")
    val = winreg.QueryValueEx(aKey, "")
    print (val)


    # ---------------- Here the error line ----------------

    return str(val[0]).split('"')[1]

    # --------- the registry key value doesn't contains any quote
    # --------- it contains a comma to separate the file name from the icon #. 
    # --------- So the split() function won't return any array 
    # --------- and the index [1] cause an error stopping the python script.
    # ---------------- ----------------



except EnvironmentError:
    try:
        aKey = winreg.OpenKey(aReg, r"Applications\inkscape.exe\shell\open\command")
        val = winreg.QueryValueEx(aKey, "")
        return str(val[0]).split('"')[1]
    except EnvironmentError:
        return 'inkscape'

I changed the line to:

return str(val[0]).split(',')[1]

and restarted LyX and it worked first shot!