I've had problems downloading and installing MiKTeX 2.6.
1. The update program fails with the message
The operation could not be completed for the following reason:
FTP: Couldn't retrieve (RETR) the specified file
It failed in the same way on several sites.
2. I then tried going to various mirror sites and downloading all the
packages individually by anonymous, passive ftp -- this was able to
get some of the files, but failed on many others with "550 permission
denied" -- presumably that error causing problems for the update
program.
3. Googling "tex-archive/systems/win32/miktex/tm/packages" located an
http (not an ftp) site that had what seemed to be the distribution.
It was possible to wget these and save them in a local directory. The
update program could not install from this local directory and failed
with a (deeply unhelpful) error message saying that it was not a valid
installation. One of my colleagues ran a monitor program and saw that
update seemed to be looking for a README file and checking its length.
That file was not in the local directory (I forget why not) and, after
retrieving it an placing it in the local directory, I got the
installation to work.
There must be an easier way.
Without solving the problem of using the update program to retrieve
files from an ftp site, I'm not going to have any easy way of getting
new packages.
Suggestions?
David Guaspari
MiKTeX and proTeXt ⇒ MiKTeX 2.6, problem retrieving packages with "update"
