kpathsea libraryNot all TEX distributions install the kpathsea library,
even though they install applications built with it, and the
texmf.cnf configuration file which controls it.
If the library does not appear to be in your distribution, then you
can obtain and build it yourself. The library is distributed as part
of the web2c (Unix TEX source) distribution, which you can
find at <ftp://ftp.tug.org/tex/web2c.tar.gz>, or mirrored on
CTAN sites (for example at <http://www.tex.ac.uk> in
directory systems/web2c).
Take a copy of the
library (this is a big distribution), and unpack it. Go into the
kpathsea directory and do the usual
`./configure; make; make install' routine. With (some?)
older distributions of the library this appeared not to work, and you
had to go to the parent of the kpathsea directory, delete the
web2c directory (which is the bulk of the distribution), then configure
and build it as usual, ignoring the warnings about the missing main
texmf tree.