Miktex in a bottle

[Ralfpf]

Can anyone help me to get Miktex run in a "bottles" environment with "Wine"?

I need it because I want to stick with my beloved editor of choice, Winedt. I already managed to install Miktex, the setup ran, the files are downloaded and can be reached by console or Winedt. But there are severe issues regarding the format files of pdflatex, latex, latex2e, Xelatex aso (Not plain tex, not Xetex or pdftex, strangely! They seem to work.). I can't build them not over the miktex-console nor a command shell. It exits with an unspecified error. The miktex-console doesn't work cleanly either. I need some tricks to get it run, at least i need to run it with an virtual dektop. Can this is be related to other issues with miktex on Linux regarding Dotnet?

If it would be possible to run Miktex in the Linux-Version and get it hooked by Winedt inside a Bottle, that would be also a great solution.

My decision to leave Windows for good would be sweetened a lot, if I still can use Winedt. If not, I need to get used to another editor. The author of winedt also would be happy, if we could solve this problem. But he didn't wanted to get involved himself due to his massive workload maintaining it for Windows.

[Ralfpf]

Update: I managed it to get an running instance of Miktex in a bottle.

The problem that has occured was a path problem. Somehow the automatic path creation fails in certain conditions, depending on the chosen mode and install location. When it fails, there is a workaround that stumped me at the solution. You need to add a directory to the paths that contain the miktex config files. In my first attempt they came from a miktex installation of the host OS, Linux Mint 21.3 in my case (Not a self runner either).

After several tests I found the following. If you install Miktex in a standard bottle set to "Applications" under the soda environment, where you may need a big enough virtual desktop to run the console, you need to choose "Private Install" and keep the install directory inside the suggested user directory. Choose "no" for automatical updates, uncheck learn more and exit without updating. The install then exits properly. You can copy the log inside the window, there will be some errors I didn't resolve yet. Then start the console from the bottles menu, and try to build the "Latex" format file f.e. If it works, you have won. You can then update, set your repository, also check automatical updates. If the installer has run into a problem creating a path, it may fail again.

Having that done it wasn't a problem to install Windedt, also Sumatra-pdf (There are some issues between winedt and sumatra yet). If I also can install libreoffice in that bottle (I need it for some shell-scripts inside my tex files), then the migration worked perfectly well.