Inquiry about installing texlive 2021

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Thanks for the screen snapshot, Fairouz, which shows that it is
install-tl that has stopped. 

Normally, on a physical machine, a complete install takes well under
one hour.  On virtual machines with emulated CPUs (different than the
physical CPU), it takes three to four hours.

If you stop the installer (e.g., by typing Control-Z to suspend, or
Control-C to kill), it will have saved a file with a name like
"installation.profile", or something similar, that records its
progress.  If you run install-tl a second time, it will proceed
quickly through the already installed packages, and then resume where
it left off.

Before doing that, however, run "df /path/to/texlive/2021" and 
"df /tmp".  If either looks like it is almost full, then you need to
free some disk space by deleting or compressing unneeded files.

If your disk is small, you may not be able to do a full install of TeX
Live, but you can use the install-tl setup panel to select something
other than the full version.  If you need to do that, be sure to
remove the current profile and log in the directory from which you ran
install-tl, and delete the TeX Live 2021 partial installation tree.

On many Unix systems, when packages are installed or updated, package
files are saved in /var/cache.  Run "du -sh /var/cache" as root to see
how much space is being used there.  If it is a lot (say, several
gigabytes), you can recover space on any Linux distribution that uses
apt with "apt clean all".  That just removes the downloaded package
archives, not the installed packages, so it is quite safe.  If they
are needed in the future, they will be automatically downloaded again.

If disk space is tight, there may be other files in your system that
are eating up space unnecessarily.  I had that problem today on one
virtual machine, so I ran as root

	# find / -type f -size +5G -ls | sort -k7,7n > /tmp/foo.ls
	# tail -n20 /tmp/foo.ls

to get a list of files larger than 5GB sorted in ascending size, and
then look at the 20 largest ones.  In my case, they turned out to be
no-longer-needed log files, so I just deleted them, and got back
many gigabytes of disk space.

If they are critical system logs that you don't want to lose, you can
preserve their contents, but shrink their size, by compression,
e.g. with one of these tools:

	gzip -9 file(s)
	lzip -9 file(s)
	xz   -9 file(s)

lzip can often compress log files by 50x to 100x, so it tends to be my
preferred compressor.

Let us know if you finally get a successful installation of TeX Live
2021 on your Ubuntu workstation!

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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