Used to be that running lilypond-book --help would print out options and a generally useful output. With 2.11.41 in Ubuntu Gutsy this is the output I get:

~$ lilypond-book --help
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/bin/lilypond-book", line 1907, in ?
    main ()
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/bin/lilypond-book", line 1833, in main
    files = do_options ()
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/bin/lilypond-book", line 1798, in do_options
    (global_options, args) = opt_parser.parse_args ()
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/lib/python2.4/optparse.py", line 1275, in parse_args
    stop = self._process_args(largs, rargs, values)
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/lib/python2.4/optparse.py", line 1315, in _process_args
    self._process_long_opt(rargs, values)
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/lib/python2.4/optparse.py", line 1390, in _process_long_opt
    option.process(opt, value, values, self)
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/lib/python2.4/optparse.py", line 707, in process
    return self.take_action(
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/lib/python2.4/optparse.py", line 728, in take_action
    parser.print_help()
  File "/usr/local/lilypond/usr/lib/python2.4/optparse.py", line 1533, in print_help
    file.write(self.format_help())
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xed' in position 1381: ordinal not in range(128).
--
Daniel Tonda C.