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