[tex-live] Messed up TL installation

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Oct 19 16:27:20 CEST 2011


2011/10/19 Haines Brown <haines at histomat.net>:
> I am running Debian Squeeze and installed its version of TeXLive 2009.
> However, I needed to upgrade TL to 2011 from CTAN. I read on line the
> advice to delete an old version of TL before installing a newer
> version. What I did was to delete the texmf directories, and that got
> me into trouble that I've been trying to rectify.
>
I think Debian has its own dummy package that does not install
anything but keeps the dependencies. The problem is that various
packages depend on TeX so that you cannot just remove it. However, you
can install TeX Live and prepend it to your PATH and MANPATH. First,
as a root, I create /usr/local/texlive and make it writable by me. All
TL versions will be there as default. Afterwards I install TL as a
normal user and later can do "tlmgr update" again as a normal user. It
is possible to have several versions of TL and switch between them. I
have a lot of space on one computer so that I can keep 2007 to 2011
and just by changing PATH I can decide which one to use.

-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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