[tex-live] Installing latest TeX Live on Ubuntu

[George N. White III]

On 2/26/12, Axel E. Retif <axel.retif at mac.com> wrote:
> On 02/26/2012 06:50 PM, Bob Plantz wrote:
>
>> What happens if I install another program from the Ubuntu repositories
>> that depends on TexLive? It, of course, insists that the TexLive version
>> from the Ubuntu repositories (TL 2009) be installed. Should one install
>> both versions of TexLive?

The important thing to know about official CRAN TeXLive is that it is
completely self-contained under on top-level directory.  It does not
mess with your system.   If you put the CRAN TeXlive bin directory
at the front of your PATH you will get CRAN TeXLive programs, but
if you remove the entry the corresponding distro programs will work
normally.  A minor quibble with this is that in practice it is sometimes
necessary to add the CRAN TeXLive fonts to your font configuration
so they are available to pdf viewers and drawing packages.

> What I do, as I said, is let apt-get or Synaptic install whatever they
> want, just taking care that the path to TeXLive binaries is prepended.

I do the same, but there are a few issues to watch for:

1.  different versions of fonts from the distro packages and TL.
This can cause obscure problems when using distro pdf viewers
or including pdf's made with distro tools in a TL document.

2.  some distro tools have hard-coded dependencies on the distro TL
programs (e.g., /usr/bin/program) which can cause problems (e.g., not
finding fonts present in TL but not present in the distro packages)

I recommend against asking TL to create symbolic links to permit
using the binaries via some default path entry (/usr/bin or /usr/local/bin)
because it is more difficult to debug problems and is not easily reversed.

> I also have / and /home in different partitions, but I let texlive in
> /usr/local. When changing OSs, I tar my whole TeXLive in /home, but it
> *really* takes time to tar and untar.

I also keep TeXLive on a separate partition. /usr/local/texlive is a
symbolic link to
the actual location.

>
>
> Best
>
> Axel
>


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia