TeX Live 2009

Installing TeX Live

TeX Live is a distribution that allows you to install TeX and friends on most operating systems. It comes with many, many additional packages, and for the time being, it is the only TeX distribution for all major OS (Windows, linux, OS X) that has regular updates. The release cycle is about once a year; the 2009 version was released in November 2009 (before that, it also had a release in 2008, 2007, 2005 and so on).

There is a number of ways to install TeX Live on your computer:

• you can obtain DVDs or CDs from a TeX user group (e.g. TUG TeX Live homepage); if you're a member of such a group, you may have received a copy as part of your membership benefits;

• you can use netinstall

• as teTeX will not be updated any longer, many linux distributions are switching to TeXLive instead (I know this is the case for Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, gentoo [at least the process is beginning]), Fedora (planed for F8); the same may be true for other distributions;

If you want to use the installation procedure provided by your distribution, refer to its documentation. This wiki page will explain how to install TeXLive from the DVD/iso-images and via a rpm package.

Installation from the TeXLive CDs/DVDs/iso images

Obtaining the Necessary Files

If you have a DVD, just pop it in. If you want to download the latest TeXLive release, point your browser to the nearest CTAN mirror and go to the directory systems/texlive/Images/. Download the latest iso images. Please be warned: these images are huge (the compressed DVD image is 880 MB and will expand to 1.7 GB!), so if you're on a slow connection (e.g., via modem), the download will take very long to complete.

Beginning and Customizing the Installation

Once you have downloaded and saved the file, decompress it and mount it. The installation procedure is command-line based, so change to a terminal window, cd to the directory where the DVD or the TeXLive iso has been mounted and start the installation process (on most systems, you will need root privileges to install, so either switch to a root terminal by typing su or precede the second line with sudo):

cd TeXLive2007
./install-tl.sh 

The installation process itself is pretty self-explanatory, so I mention just a few points that may be of interest:

be sure to type B in order to verify that your specific combination of architecture and operating system will be installed. Here is the list of architectures that are currently available:

Available sets of binaries: 
  alpha_linux: DEC Alpha with GNU/Linux
  hppa_hpux: HP-UX
  i386_darwin: Intel x86 with MacOSX/Darwin
  i386_freebsd: Intel x86 with FreeBSD
  i386_linux: Intel x86 with GNU/Linux
  i386_openbsd: Intel x86 with OpenBSD
  i386_solaris: Intel x86 with Sun Solaris
  mips_irix: SGI IRIX
  powerpc_aix: PowerPC with AIX
  powerpc_darwin: PowerPC with MacOSX/Darwin
  powerpc_linux: PowerPC with GNU/Linux
  sparc_linux: Sparc with GNU/Linux
  sparc_solaris: Sparc with Solaris
  win32: Windows
  x86_64_linux: Intel x86_64 with GNU/Linux
You can now choose to install some of these 

Also, type C to choose what you want to install (maybe you don't want the Mongolian documentation to save some disk space?) and L to choose which language collections to install. Then, begin the installation process by typing I.

Post-Install

The first and most important thing you have to do after installation is add the new binaries to your $PATH variable. There are two ways to do this:

• at the first installation screen, you can choose as an option create symlinks in standard directories. If you choose this option, you create symbolic links to the new binaries in a directory that is already part of your $PATH such as /usr/bin;

• you can add the standard directory where TeXLive installs the binaries to your $PATH.

Both ways have their advantages and drawbacks. Adding symlinks is probably faster and easier if you don't have much experience, but it may make uninstalling or reinstalling more troublesome in the future. I would recommend adding the new location to your $PATH. How to do this depends on the shell you're using; there's a thorough and simple tutorial at http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Path.html. TeXLive has its binaries in this location: /usr/local/texlive/2007/bin/<architecture>, with <architecture> being the name of the system on which you're running (see above). Once you have set up your $PATH variable or added symlinks, make sure that your system finds the new binaries. One way to test this would be to run:

which pdftex

pdftex --version

The output of the first command should point to the new binary, the output of the second command is, with the latest TeXLive installed:

pdfTeX 3.141592-1.40.3-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.6)
kpathsea version 3.5.6
Copyright 2007 Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).
Kpathsea is copyright 2007 Karl Berry and Olaf Weber.
There is NO warranty.  Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the pdfTeX copyright and
the Lesser GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING and the pdfTeX source.
Primary author of pdfTeX: Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).
Kpathsea written by Karl Berry, Olaf Weber, and others.

Compiled with libpng 1.2.15; using libpng 1.2.15
Compiled with zlib 1.1.4; using zlib 1.2.3
Compiled with xpdf version 3.01

Once the new binaries are found, you want to generate the necessary formats. It has often been suggested that ConTeXt formats be managed by texexec, not by fmtutil-sys. If you want this (and I would say it is the better choice), first run (and again, add sudo if necessary)

fmtutil-sys --edit

in lines 68 and 69 of the file that opens, put the symbols #! in front of the line beginning with cont-en and cont-nl. Then, run fmtutil-sys:

fmtutil-sys --all

This will generate all formats necessary for TeXing except the formats for ConTeXt. In the next step, we will let ConTeXt create its own formats. Run

texexec --make --all

This should create all necessary formats, include all available languages, and install in the right location. The latest TeXLive has resolved the problem with the $engine subdirectory that has bugged ConTeXt users so long. After generating the formats, run texhash again and verify that the format files are found:

kpsewhich --engine=pdftex cont-en.fmt
texhash
/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/web2c/pdftex/cont-en.fmt

If you want to use XeTeX with ConTeXt as well, repeat the procedure for this format:

texexec --xtx --make --all
texhash
kpsewhich --engine=xetex cont-en.fmt
/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/web2c/xetex/cont-en.fmt

Updating ConTeXt

TeXLive in principle offers no option to update between release cycles. But of course, you will want to update ConTeXt as soon as Hans releases a new version. This is easy to achieve: the installation process has created a skeleton directory /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local. It is empty right after installation. cd to this directory, download the latest cont-tmf.zip from the pragma website. Then unzip this archive and run

texexec --make --all

again. This will update your installation and the formats to the latest available version. When you want to update again later, simply repeat the process, overwriting all older files when unzipping.

texmfstart

One final step: once everything is in place, put a small textfile somewhere in your $PATH with these two lines:

#!/bin/sh
ruby /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb $@

This way, texexec will be called by texmfstart and stop complaining...

Thomas 13:38, 3 February 2007 (CET)