CentOS - Jan 2020 - Centos 7 Lyx - installing templates and class files

I'm not kind of an expert using Lyx, but I occasionally do some
"structured writing" and on those occasions I've really enjoyed
using Lyx; the workflow and the output just can't be beat.

I'm enough of a novice with it that I've never used anything other than
the "Article (Standard Class)" document class.

I wrote a short paper using Lyx and the "Article (Standard Class)"
last night, and after finishing that I started playing around with Lyx in an
effort to learn more about it since I really believe that I'm drastically
under-utilizing an extremely powerful program.

I have a question about the template and class files.

When I use "File - New from Template" I get a large list of files in
the /usr/share/lyx/templates/ directory, all of which seem to have come from the
lyx-common rpm.  When I select one of these templates, some of them work but
some of them say something like: "The selected document class requires
external files that are not available.  The document class cannot be compiled
until the following prerequisites are installed: XXX.cls" (where XXX is
usually a name related somehow to the name of the template).

Searching for the XXX.

Same thing if I just use "File - New" and then look at Document -
Settings - Document Class".  There are all kinds of document classes listed
but about 75% of them are grayed out and unselectable.

It appears that lyx-common installs all kinds of templates but not the cls files
that are needed to actually use them.  It would be nice to somehow enable all of
these templates and document classes so I could play around with them a bit.

Some google searching has led to some fairly contradictory information about how
this all works.

One suggestion that I came across was to simply install all of the available
texlive rpms and that will install all of the missing files.  rpm tells me that
I currently have 216 texlive* rpms on my computer, and yum says that there are
688 texlive* rpms available so there are apparently another 472 texlive rpms
that I don't actually have installed.

Before I install 472 more rpms on this computer I would like to ask any of you
fine folks who use lyx if this is indeed the right way to go about this, or if
I'm barking up the wrong tree here?

How do you get the rest of the files that Lyx needs to be able to use that long
list of (unavailable) document classes and templates?

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Real D 3D Digital Cinema ~ www.melvilletheatre.com

Can you use
yum whatprovides FILE_GLOB
to figure out which package provides the particular class files that seem
relevant?

On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 17:02:20 -0500
Noam Bernstein via CentOS wrote:
> Can you use
> yum whatprovides FILE_GLOB
> to figure out which package provides the particular class files that seem
> relevant?
It appears that most of the class files don't exist in the form of a rpm. 
In fact, some of this stuff doesn't seem to be downloadable as a .cls file
(which is the format that lyx expects to see).  Somehow (that I haven't yet
read up on) you are to convert a tex file that you download from a random ftp
site into a cls file and that goes into a directory that lyx can see.

Obviously, I have some more reading and figuring out to do here. A lot of this
stuff was apparently never packaged for easy installation on a rpm-based system.

I still think lyx is a very cool program.  I don't use very often but every
time I do I always think that I should be using it for more.

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Real D 3D Digital Cinema ~ www.melvilletheatre.com