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I started my hosting with DreamHost (several years ago) and used MathTex on my main Control Systems Engineering site. MathTex required a compile and install on my DreamHost VPS and that worked out. However, that VPS get hammered on a regular basis. The VPS then complains and wants me to pay for more resources. I have excess capacity on the dedicated hosting I've moved most of my sites over the past couple of years.

I've tried compiling MathTex on Lucid but never could get it figured out. I asked for help on StackOverflow and I eventually "answered" it myself when I found that I could get it through apt-get on 12.04.

However, now I'm stuck on figuring out how to use MathTex as installed by apt-get. This feels a lot like a noob question to me but for the life of me I can't figure out how ot use it and my Googling just leaves me with page after page of Source Package info that doesn't help at all.

I've installed mathtex using apt-get. It was successful and returned no errors. It appeared (this was a week or so ago) to install dvipng and such as well (which was necessary when I did the compile and install myself on DreamHost years ago). Using sudo find / -name 'mathtex.cgi' returns nothing.

What am I missing?

I have done a fresh compile and I can get it to work from the command line just fine. I've followed the instructions here for enabling it with Apache on a standard LAMP stack. Most of it was already setup. Still no go using the browser. I just get a redirect to the /cgi-bin/ subdirectory and a 404. I've even tried creating a symlink to /usr/lib/cgi-bin in order to make sure the URL goes there. But then the browser attempts to download the mathtex.cgi file.

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Have you looked at the Mathtex manual here forkosh.com/mathtex.html. You mave missed some dependencies which are listed in the document – Stephen Myall Aug 29 '12 at 14:33
Oh yes, I've looked and looked at the Mathtex manual - you get a local copy as well when you extract the zip file. I have been able to get MathTex to run successfully from the command line so it appears to have been compiled correctly. However, when I attempt to get to it from the browser the browser attempts to download mathtex.cgi instead of showing the image it should show. I think this is an Apache config/server issue as I've been able to do this successfully on my home boxes back when they were Ubuntu 10.04 - I haven't tried with my home boxes now at 12.04. – user73279 Aug 30 '12 at 15:16

closed as not a real question by izx, Mitch, John S Gruber, jokerdino♦, fossfreedom♦ Aug 30 '12 at 15:29

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