One day before the release of Ubuntu 11.04, I decided to reformat my netbook a day early. I was really disappointed to find that Natty is still stuck in the past with TeX Live 2009. Considering many of the most commonly used packages have broken compatibility with their oder versions, this isn’t acceptable.
I’ve avoided doing a manual install of TeX Live 2010 because I’ve imagined as being such a pain in the ass. But to my surprise, it was pretty simple. The hardest part was tricking Ubuntu’s package manager into knowing that TeX Live is installed without pulling the crappy copy off of the repos.
To start, just download the small gzip from here. Unpack it and change directory into it in a terminal.
sudo apt-get install perl-tk
which you’ll need for the installer GUI. Now, run the installer:
sudo ./install-tl --gui
Once your in the installer, go through the list of options. If you don’t know what they do, you probably don’t need to bother with it. The main one to look out for are A4 vs. Letter paper. I didn’t generate the simlinks, but you’ll have to edit your PATH variable later. Hit the install button and go make yourself a sandwich. You’ll be a while.
At the end of the install, you’ll get the following message
Add /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/doc/man to MANPATH.
Add /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/doc/info to INFOPATH.
Most importantly, add /usr/local/texlive/2010/bin/x86-linux
to your PATH for current and future sessions.
Note, you’ll get a message which reflects your architecture. (x86_64, for example.)
So, to add those directories to the paths, you’ll want to edit your bashrc:
gedit ~/.bashrc
In my case, I added the following lines:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/texlive/2010/bin/i386-linux export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/doc/man export INFOPATH=$INFOPATH:/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/doc/info
Now, install a few more packages:
sudo apt-get install tex-common texinfo lmodern perl-tk
Be sure to restart the terminal (or source ~/.bashrc) before you try using anything.
Now, if you try to bring anything from the repositories that depends on TeX Live, apt is going to pull over Ubuntu’s crappy copy. To avoid this, I created a meta package which checks off all of the TeX Live packages but doesn’t install anything.
I got the following from schlasim’s ubuntu blog. First, paste and execute the following lines one at a time:
sudo apt-get install equivs mkdir /tmp/tl-equivs && cd /tmp/tl-equivs equivs-control texlive-local
Now, edit the file texlive-local (gedit texlive-local), which was just created by the equivs-control program. Paste in the following lines:
Section: misc Priority: optional Standards-Version: 3.6.2 Package: texlive-local Version: 2010-1~1 Maintainer: you Provides: biblatex, biblatex-dw, cm-super, cm-super-minimal, context, dvipng, feynmf, fragmaster, lacheck, latex-beamer, latex-cjk-all, latex-cjk-chinese, latex-cjk-chinese-arphic-bkai00mp, latex-cjk-chinese-arphic-bsmi00lp, latex-cjk-chinese-arphic-gbsn00lp, latex-cjk-chinese-arphic-gkai00mp, latex-cjk-common, latex-cjk-japanese, latex-cjk-japanese-wadalab, latex-cjk-korean, latex-cjk-thai, latex-cjk-xcjk, latexmk, latex-sanskrit, latex-xcolor, lcdf-typetools, lmodern, luatex, musixlyr, musixtex, pgf, preview-latex-style, prosper, ps2eps, psutils, purifyeps, t1utils, tex4ht, tex4ht-common, tex-gyre, texlive, texlive-base, texlive-base-bin, texlive-base-bin-doc, texlive-bibtex-extra, texlive-binaries, texlive-common, texlive-doc-base, texlive-doc-bg, texlive-doc-cs+sk, texlive-doc-de, texlive-doc-el, texlive-doc-en, texlive-doc-es, texlive-doc-fi, texlive-doc-fr, texlive-doc-it, texlive-doc-ja, texlive-doc-ko, texlive-doc-mn, texlive-doc-nl, texlive-doc-pl, texlive-doc-pt, texlive-doc-ru, texlive-doc-si, texlive-doc-th, texlive-doc-tr, texlive-doc-uk, texlive-doc-vi, texlive-doc-zh, texlive-extra-utils, texlive-fonts-extra, texlive-fonts-extra-doc, texlive-fonts-recommended, texlive-fonts-recommended-doc, texlive-font-utils, texlive-formats-extra, texlive-games, texlive-generic-extra, texlive-generic-recommended, texlive-humanities, texlive-humanities-doc, texlive-lang-african, texlive-lang-all, texlive-lang-arab, texlive-lang-arabic, texlive-lang-armenian, texlive-lang-croatian, texlive-lang-cyrillic, texlive-lang-czechslovak, texlive-lang-danish, texlive-lang-dutch, texlive-lang-finnish, texlive-lang-french, texlive-lang-german, texlive-lang-greek, texlive-lang-hebrew, texlive-lang-hungarian, texlive-lang-indic, texlive-lang-italian, texlive-lang-latin, texlive-lang-latvian, texlive-lang-lithuanian, texlive-lang-manju, texlive-lang-mongolian, texlive-lang-norwegian, texlive-lang-other, texlive-lang-polish, texlive-lang-portuguese, texlive-lang-spanish, texlive-lang-swedish, texlive-lang-tibetan, texlive-lang-ukenglish, texlive-lang-vietnamese, texlive-latex3, texlive-latex-base, texlive-latex-base-doc, texlive-latex-extra, texlive-latex-extra-doc, texlive-latex-recommended, texlive-latex-recommended-doc, texlive-luatex, texlive-math-extra, texlive-metapost, texlive-metapost-doc, texlive-music, texlive-omega, texlive-pictures, texlive-pictures-doc, texlive-plain-extra, texlive-pstricks, texlive-pstricks-doc, texlive-publishers, texlive-publishers-doc, texlive-science, texlive-science-doc, texlive-xetex, texpower, texpower-manual, thailatex, tipa, ttf-freefont, ttf-gfs-artemisia, ttf-gfs-baskerville, ttf-gfs-bodoni-classic, ttf-gfs-didot, ttf-gfs-didot-classic, ttf-gfs-gazis, ttf-gfs-neohellenic, ttf-gfs-olga, ttf-gfs-porson, ttf-gfs-solomos, ttf-gfs-theokritos, ttf-sil-gentium, xindy, xindy-rules Architecture: all Description: My local installation of TeX Live 2010. A full "vanilla" TeX Live 2010 http://tug.org/texlive/debian#vanilla
Now, finish off by executing the last two lines:
equivs-build texlive-local sudo dpkg -i texlive-local_2010-1~1_all.deb
You should now be able to maintain your own TeX Live installation. You can update or install packages as you see fit, and you don’t have to deal with out of date packages causing you frustration.
Related posts:
- TeXtext for Math in Inkscape Recent versions of Inkscape have functionality for creating math from...
- Compiling GNUPLOT from CVS with Ubuntu If one were to read many articles on t-square, it...
I got the following error message when following the above procedure with TexLive2011 and ubuntu 11.10 :
ravi@raviM1330:/tmp/tl-equivs$ equivs-build texlive-local
dh_testdir
dh_testroot
dh_clean -k
dh_clean: dh_clean -k is deprecated; use dh_prep instead
dh_clean: Compatibility levels before 5 are deprecated.
sh: cannot open package: No such file
sh: defaults: not found
dh_clean: rm -f debian/.*.debhelper returned exit code 127
make: *** [install] Error 25
Error in the build process: exit status 2
cannot remove path when cwd is /tmp/tl-equivs/equivs.ObB_Jq for /tmp/tl-equivs/equivs.ObB_Jq: at /usr/share/perl/5.12/File/Temp.pm line 902
Would be grateful if the meta package and method could be updated.
Did you ever get this fixed? Sorry, I didn’t maintain my site for some time. Back into the swing now.
I just recently did an install under the latest Ubuntu 11.10, and the procedure seems to work still.
How do you start it?
I have texlive-games installed, but it doesn’t show up in any menu, & there does not seem to be a straightforward way of starting it, whether through command-line or terminal.
I’m starting to think it’s yet another piece of useless garbage.
It`s not at all a useless piece of garbage, but baed on your comment I highly suspect that you are unclear about what TeXLive is, or the texlive-games package. It is not a game for you to play, it is a package full of macros that can be called while typesetting documents with LaTeX. The textlive-games ubuntu package installs LaTeX package files for doing things such as drawing chess boards and soduku grids in documents.
If this is not what you intended, I do highly suggest you read documentation before installing packages. You`re pretty safe just installing things from the Ubuntu repos, but it is possible for you to destabalize your system with the wrong package.
Hope that helps!