I've installed the prerequisites for 1.4.0 and then 1.4.0 itself as per http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Running_MediaWiki_on_FreeBSD on my FreeBSD 5.3 box.

The wiki is working just fine, but texvc isn't. make ran clearly and there's what looks very like a binary there, but it isn't working. The symptom is that you put a piece of text in the page, e.g. <math>a \over b</math> and, instead of a nice PNG, you get:

"Failed to parse (PNG conversion failed; check for correct installation of latex, dvips, gs, and convert): a \over b"

What I have here:

* latex, dvips, gs and convert are all present in /usr/local/bin .

* Per the README, I put putenv("PATH=".getenv("PATH").":/usr/local/bin"); near the top of LocalSettings.php .

* The web server runs as user www:www, and the /usr/local/www/data/mediawiki-1.4.0/ directory and everything under it has permissions 644 or 755 and is owned by www:www.

* images/tmp exists and contains TeX files, so it's generating those, just failing to render them. But we could have guessed that.

* no errors generated by this in /var/log/httpd-error.log .

* Brion suggested on irc to make sure PHP safe mode is off. I *think* it is, looking at the config files.

Any clues? Is there some obvious newbie 'duh' I've missed?

- d.