TeX Live and MacTeX ⇒ Installing TeX Live 2010 from DVD (vs. TeX Live 2009)

[josephwright]

Yes, we did :) TeX Live 2010 is not longer "live", i.e., you can't run it directly from DVD any more. It was too big this year to fit on a single DVD, so we switched to compressed packaging, the same that we use also for over-the-network installations. The upside is what you observed: much quicker installation, because there is much less I/O on a DVD drive.

Cheers,

Tomek

Worth knowing: I ran a course earlier in the year and installation turned into something of a nightmare. I'll be testing this out once I've got a TeX Live 2010 DVD.

[kalwisti]

Hi, Tomek,

Thank you for the explanation. I admire what the TeX Live developers and other TeXperts are doing; it makes life much easier for us "regular" users. (I joined TUG three years ago as a small gesture of appreciation and support).

I remember that when I first encountered LaTeX and wanted to try it, installing it seemed like a monumental task; it required technical knowledge that was way over my head. Now, thanks to TeX Live, MacTeX, MiKTeX and the packaging done by various Linux distros, it's much simpler to have a working TeX installation.

Again, I appreciate everyone's hard work and dedication.
=david

[kalwisti]

This is a follow-up post on my second (successful) attempt to install TL 2010 from a DVD. Yesterday I took the plunge and replaced my Fedora 12 Xfce Spin with the new Fedora 14 Xfce Spin, as F12 will reach its EOL [End of Life] next week. Surprisingly, the most recent version of TeX Live in the F14 repositories is 2007, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to retry installing TL 2010.

This time I used the GUI option of the TL Installer, which you can see here, if you're interested:

TL2010-GUI-Screenshot.png (168.14 KiB) Viewed 3418 times

(Hint: As the TL installation notes suggest, you will need to install the perl-TK package before you can invoke the GUI).

To start the GUI version of the installer, you can type:

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$ perl install-tl -gui

The only change I made to the TL Installer's default settings was to toggle the "Default paper size" to "letter." Although I saw the option mentioned by both frabjous and sommerfee about creating symlinks ("Create symlinks in system directories"), I chose to accept the default value of "No" and manually set my PATH after the installation was finished.

F14 has a ~/.bash_profile -- no ~/.bash_login or ~/.profile -- so I followed my previous pattern of simply adding the three lines below to this file:

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# .bash_profile

# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
	. ~/.bashrc
fi

# User specific environment and startup programs

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

export PATH

PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2010/bin/i386-linux:$PATH; export PATH
MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH; export MANPATH
INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH; export INFOPATH

Learning from my mistake on Debian, after saving the file, I logged out of my account and completely rebooted the system. Then, when I ran texhash as root, the TeX tree was updated without any problems. (No more complaints about "texhash: Command not found").

I checked the setup as outlined in the TL Installation Guide, and also did the necessary font configuration for XeTeX. Everything seems to be working fine so far.

While configuring the fonts post-install, it took some time to figure out where the texlive-fontconfig.conf file resides. It is here:

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/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-var/fonts/conf

The only other (minor) issue I ran into was that F14 uses Evince as its default PDF reader, and Evince cannot display .dvi files until you install the package "evince-dvi" (which is a backend for displaying DVIs). For good measure, I went ahead and installed xdvik (which pulled in some TL 2007 dependencies) and xpdf.

Thanks to everyone for their help, patience and for sharing their LaTeX knowledge.