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10.5: Make LaTeXit work on 10.5
Authored by: Paolo.Bosetti on Nov 30, '07 03:44:36AM

There is actually a much easier workaround: simply change your /etc/profile commenting the following lines (add the "#" at the begining):

# if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
# eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
# fi

and adding the following two:

PATH="/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin"
export PATH

Why so? Apple changed the Leopard way to set the PATH variable, and now it uses the /usr/libexec/path_helper command, which seems having troubles with LaTeXiT spawned bash scripts. If you make this modification to your /etc/profile, you are simply dropping the new path_helper in favour of the plain old way to set the PATH variable.
This also explain why some people says "on my mac it works fine": they already have a customized /etc/profile and they made an upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5, and upgrade installs don't change modified system files (looks so).



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10.5: Make LaTeXit work on 10.5
Authored by: grahamdennis on Jan 02, '08 03:09:42PM

I was having the same problem on my laptop when I installed Leopard, but not on my desktop, and I didn't change /etc/profile on either. Further investigation (with the help of your comment) showed that the problem was that I had /opt/local/bin at the start of my PATH in my ~/.profile file on the laptop (this is what MacPorts suggests as a default), while on my desktop I had previously decided this was a bad idea, and put it at the end of my PATH variable.

Putting /opt/local/bin after the standard PATH in my ~/.profile file on the laptop fixed the problem (after logging out). It seems that /usr/libexec/path_helper reads the ~/.profile file, and I believe the reason your fix corrected the problem was that it basically amounted to putting /opt/local/bin after /bin, /usr/bin, etc.

Cheers,
Graham



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10.5: Make LaTeXit work on 10.5
Authored by: autumnmist on Jan 17, '08 08:59:59PM

This is indeed the way to fix things.



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path_helper freezing
Authored by: Lliwynd on Apr 10, '08 05:16:47PM

I had the same issue: /usr/libexec/path_helper -s was freezing and using 100% CPU when starting LaTeX*It. (never seen this before on 10.5)

I found that I couldn't even kill it easily (it took a kill -9 to make it die). However, once I killed it, latexit continued to load and seemed to work fine.



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