[tex-live] TeX Live installation tools

[Magnus Lewis-Smith]

On 03/11/10 15:09, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
>
>
> Vladimir Lomov wrote:
>
>> AFAIU, you could install TL on Windows machine and export (share) the
>> path with installed TL over the net or install TL on linux host with
>> several platforms and export using samba the TL for windows machines. Or
>> just copy the whole root (for example, if you install TL in C:\texlive,
>> so there are C:\texlive\2010, C:\texlive\texmf-local) to other windows
>> machine. The only thing left: you have to register (associate) the tex
>> extension with texworks (seems this is one of the actions that windows
>> installer do in contrast to linux one) manually.
>>
>> On my work I installed TL on linux and binaries for Windows, then
>> "share" the installation root over the net (using samba) and tried them
>> on Windows (Windows 7). All work fine (actually I tried not all
>> binaries, only (pdf)latex, dvips, pdfinfo).
>
> What would happen in these circumstances if, for example,
> a DVI driver detected a missing PK and decided to build it
> from the MF sources ? Where would the resulting PK try
> to go : somewhere on the local machine, or somewhere
> on the server ?
>
> Philip Taylor

Reading section 4 (Network Installations) at
http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-430004
suggests to me that you could install texlive on one machine in, say, 
C:\texlive and then copy that directory in its entirety to whatever 
machine you want.  So long as the directory containing binaries is in 
the path it should all work.

(caveat: I don't use windows, but this does work for Linux)

Of course, just copying the source folder doesn't install the start menu 
stuff, but I think that can be handled using the w32client installer 
mentioned at the above link (or directly from
http://tug.org/texlive/w32client.html)

I think PK files (and so on) are written to $TEXMFSYSVAR (somewhere in 
the texlive tree -- on the server) and if that is not writable, then to 
$TEXMFVAR (in the user's home directory)

Magnus Lewis-Smith