Manual not found in Audacity 2.0

Audacity Help Forum GNU/Linux
1

Using Ubuntu Xubuntu 12.04 with 3.2.0-23-lowlatency kernel and have downloaded the Audacity 2.0 manual and installed it in /usr/share/audacity/help/manual as directed. The index.html file resides in this same directory. However Audacity 2.0 is unable to see the file and clicking on the view manual function in the help menu yields the following error:
“You do not appear to have ‘help’ installed on your computer.
Please view or download it online.”
Apparently Audacity still cannot find the file. Is there perhaps a configuration file somewhere that needs to have the manual’s directory specified? I encountered no problem extracting the zipped files and the directory structure looks like this:
root@esocid:/usr/share/audacity/help/manual# sl
total 88
drwx------ 4 root root 4096 Jul 5 09:58 m
drwx------ 2 root root 12288 Jul 5 09:58 man
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Jul 5 09:58 manual
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Jul 5 09:58 images
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 15086 Jun 25 16:15 favicon.ico
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 36227 Jun 25 16:16 index.html
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 10099 Jun 25 16:17 quick_help.html

Thanks for any assistance you can provide. By the way, this is one great piece of software!

2

How did you install Audacity?

3

I just tried to reproduce the problem and suddenly had exactly the same trouble:

I installed the manual under “/usr/share/audacity/help/manual/index.html” etc. but Audacity indeed was unable to open the manual and the “You do not appear to have ‘help’ installed on your computer etc.” messages appeard, exactly as described by lcpetroski above.

Here is how I installed the Audacity help-files:

  • First I unzipped the zip-archive in my “/home/edgar/” HOME directory, where I got a “manual/” directory with the html-files inside.


  • Then, as super-user “root” (because as normal user “edgar” I do not have write privileges in “/usr/share/audacity/”), I first created a “help/” directory in “/usr/share/audacity/”, and then, still as user “root”, I copied the “manual/” directory with the html-help-files from “/home/edgar/manual/” to “/usr/share/audacity/help/manual/”.

Then, as normal user “edgar”, I started Audacity and still got the “You do not appear to have ‘help’ installed on your computer” window.

It turned out that because I had created the “help/” directory in “/usr/share/audacity/” as super-user “root”, the “help” directory had read-privileges only for the super-user “root”, but not for the normal user “edgar”. When I now started Audacity as user “edgar”, Audacity couldn’t open the manual because the normal user “edgar” had no read-privileges for the files in “/usr/share/audacity/help/”.

Here is how I made all normal users have read-privileges for the Audacity manual in “/usr/share/audacity/help/” under Debian Linux:

edgar:~/$ su
<password>
root:~/# chmod -R u+r /usr/share/audacity/help/
root:~/# exit
edgar:~/$

Afterwards Audacity could open the manual if started Audacity with normal “edgar” user privileges.

  • edgar
4

adgar:

I implemented the chmod’s and chown structure in the help directories as you indicated and I can now successfully access my local copy of the manual. Thank you very much for taking the time to provide your solution. Sorry I have been away a few days, but there has been a death in the family.

Leo