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 newer pdfTeX's), so again, please follow the instructions for TeTeX_3.0 installation.

The instructions for Fedora Core 5 are valid for Ubuntu 6.06, with a few caveats:

• Ubuntu's default installation lacks a few tools that you'll need to build a new version of pdfTeX and to run new versions of ConTeXt. So before upgrading, do:

 sudo apt-get install build-essential bison flex ruby 

• The configuration files that users should edit are under /etc/texmf/texmf.d. Do not edit the .cnf files in /usr/share/texmf/web2c directly; instead, edit the configlet files in the .d directory and run update-texmf or update-updmap.

After doing all of the above, the new versions seem to be working:

% 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.