Ubuntu
Each successive version of Ubuntu becomes easier to update, which is why the following sections, arranged in reverse chronological order, get successively longer.
Feisty (7.04)
As of today (January 2007), feisty is still alpha test. But when it is released, you should be able to follow the Debian installation instructions.
Edgy (6.10)
You can follow the Debian installation instructions. However, the packages depend on having tex-common later than v0.35, and the tex-common in edgy is v0.25. So go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/tex-common and get the feisty (7.04) package, which will be v0.42 or later, and install it by hand using
dpkg -i tex-common_0.42_all.deb
Now go to Debian installation.
Dapper (6.06)
Ubuntu 6.06 contains teTeX 3.0 (including ConTeXt 2005.01.31), so you can just install tetex-extra
and use ConTeXt. However, once you got your feet wet, you will probably want to install a more recent pdfTeX than the 1.21a installed with Ubuntu (since ConTeXt can give you more features with that), so again, please follow the instructions for TeTeX_3.0_installation.
I just made a fresh install of the beta release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake. It comes with a more recent version of tetex than Ubuntu 5.10, i.e. tetex-3.0.15. So after installation, you get:
TeXExec 5.2.4 - ConTeXt / PRAGMA ADE 1997-2005
texexec : TeXExec 5.2.4 - ConTeXt / PRAGMA ADE 1997-2005 texutil : TeXUtil 9.0.0 - ConTeXt / PRAGMA ADE 1992-2004 tex : pdfeTeX, 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4) context : ver: 2005.01.31 cont-en : ver: 2005.01.31 fmt: 2006.4.24 mes: english
Nevertheless, I wanted to have the latest and greatest and decided I would try to upgrade pdf(e)tex and ConTeXt. Basically, the instructions given above for Fedora Core 5 are valid for Ubuntu as well, but there are a few caveats:
- Ubuntu is missing a few tools that you'll need to build a new version of pdftex and to run new versions of ConTeXt. So before trying to upgrade, run this command:
sudo apt-get install build-essential bison flex ruby
- All the configuration files that users should edit are under /etc/texmf/texmf.d. Do not edit the files under /usr/share/texmf/web2c directly; instead, edit the files in this directory and run update-texmf or update-updmap.
I went through the process, and everything seems to be working so far:
% texexec --version TeXExec 5.4.3 - ConTeXt / PRAGMA ADE 1997-2005 texexec : TeXExec 5.4.3 - ConTeXt / PRAGMA ADE 1997-2005 texutil : TeXUtil 9.0.1 - ConTeXt / PRAGMA ADE 1992-2006 tex : pdfTeX, 3.141592-1.40.0-beta-20060213 (Web2C 7.5.5) context : ver: 2006.04.23 23:55 cont-en : ver: 2006.04.23 23:55 fmt: 2006.4.24 mes: english
Breezy (5.10)
Ubuntu 5.10 does not include a TeX-installation by default. The distribution you get when you simply choose to install TeX is teTeX-2.0.2, which is too old and will very likely not work with the latest ConTeXt versions. So you should not install it, but follow the instructions for TeTeX_3.0_installation. However, before you can do so, you will need to install a number of supplementary packages that are not included in Ubuntu by default (and I hope I'm not forgetting anything; a number of dependencies will automatically be installed as well):
# sudo apt-get install build-essential bison flex libncurses5-dev
Install these packages before trying to compile teTeX 3.0, or you will get errors during the compilation.