LaTeX Error: Cannot open log file; did you run LaTeX?

[Eli]

I encountered this error "Cannot open log file; did you run LaTeX?" message which seems to be an issue with one of the repositories registered with apt.

As a drastic measure, you can solve this problem by uninstalling all the TeX packages and do a fresh install.

To uninstall TeX packages, purge the tex-common package and then auto remove the unnecessary packages:

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1. $sudo apt-get purge tex-common
2. $sudo apt-get autoremove

Thereafter do a fresh LaTeX install:

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1. $sudo apt-get install texlive
2. $sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra

If you encounter the error "eqnarray.sty not found" download eqnarray.sty and put this file in your latex files directory.

This solution has been tested under Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS.