[tex-live] problem installing/configuring biber

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/7/24 Dirk Ullrich <dirk.ullrich at gmail.com>:
> Hello Clea,
>
> 2012/7/24 Clea F. Rees <reescf at gmail.com>:
>> My apologies if this has been covered. I lost access to this list due
>> to email issues and have resubscribed under a different account. I
>> searched the archives and found one report of a problem but that
>> thread suggested that that issue had already been fixed.
>>
>> Essentially, biber does not work for me. In TL 2011 this wasn't too
>> much of a problem. I just used bibtex8 with biblatex. The new 2012
>> release seems to be more of an issue - I can't get bibtex8 to work
>> well with biblatex and biber still fails.
>>
>> I'm not quite sure what information to provide. I installed TL 2012
>> through the net-install and tlmgr tells me no updates are available.
>> I'm using 64 bit Arch Linux but I did not install texlive through the
>> package manager but using the installer provided on the texlive site.
>>
>> biber --help
>>
>> produces no output. The exit code is 255.
>>
> [...]
>> Note: I have semi-copied MacTeX's setup in a simplified form. So that
>> /usr/local/texlive/bin and /usr/local/texlive/current are symlinks:
>>
>>  bin -> 2012/bin/x86_64-linux
>>  current -> 2012
> [...]
>> perl is version 5.16.0-2 (-2 is a distro release number)
>>
>> Note that the texlive installation is entirely under
>> /usr/local/texlive (apart from personal stuff under ~/texmf) and is
>> owned by a dedicated non-privileged user (name: texlive, group:
>> texlive).
>>
> [...]
>> System: Linux 3.4.6-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jul 20 08:21:26 CEST
>> 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux
>> System is fully up to date.
>
> I did another try to come more closer to your setup: I've installed TL
> 2010 via netinstall with a non-root user at `/usr/local/texlive' on my
> up-to-date Arch Linux x86_64, and symlinked
> `/usr/local/texlive/2012/bin/x86_64-linux' to
> `/usr/local/texlive/bin'.
>
> Even now
> /usr/local/texlive/bin/biber --help
> works as expected.
>
> Could please send the list of packages installed on your Arch Linux
> (can be generated, for instance, by `pacman -Q')?
>
Can it be the PATH problem? Is the TeX Live bin directory at the very
beginning of PATH? If not, it can take pieces of software from other
locations which may be source of different wierdly looking errors.

> Dirk



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