General ⇒ tlmgr system wide installation

[zimbodel]

I have been using LaTeX for along time to publish, and is not that familiar with the newer liveTeX installation.

The big problem for me is doing SYSTEM-WIDE installations on Linux with TeXLive
It used to be easy to do with texhash and worked well for me until TeXlive came along.

With TeXLive I take no chances and by default install all packages (about 1GB) using.
apt-get install texlive-full

Unfortunately there are still some packages missing if I do that -- go figure!

The question is:
What is the tlmgr command needed to install a texlive package system-wide.
All I get is that tlmgr tries to install in my /root directory and fails while texlive resides in /usr/share/texlive

So how do I do system-=wide package installations with tlmgr ? Google and the chaotic texlive manual helps zip.

[mas]

The big problem for me is doing SYSTEM-WIDE installations on Linux with TeXLive
It used to be easy to do with texhash and worked well for me until TeXlive came along.

It is still easier

With TeXLive I take no chances and by default install all packages (about 1GB) using.
apt-get install texlive-full

Unfortunately there are still some packages missing if I do that -- go figure!

Maybe you should avoid installing texlive from the debian repo. I install texlive directly.

The question is:
What is the tlmgr command needed to install a texlive package system-wide.
All I get is that tlmgr tries to install in my /root directory and fails while texlive resides in /usr/share/texlive

I have not used the debian repo, and so the following observation may be wrong.
I feel that tlmgr should not be used for updating a debian texlive installation.
apt-get will pull newer versions and newer packages when they are available/updated.

So how do I do system-=wide package installations with tlmgr ? Google and the chaotic texlive manual helps zip.

My advice: install texlive directly into a system readable directory, and let users set the path accordingly. If you need more info, I can provide the details.

[zimbodel]

mas,
I appreciate your kind answer.
I do disagree that it is easier, it is way more difficult than the old texhash procedure. I never had to ask these kind of installation problems with the old LaTeX procedure and on Unix I now have have this kind of trouble out of the box with system-wide installation of TeXLive. It seems that the native Unix installation has been sacrificed in order to work more cross platform. Therefore the insistence of the tlmgr to install in my /root directory, which is out of whack for Unix in a system environment and more the kind of thing you would need in windows.

Do you just off the top of your head the steps how to install on Unix or Linux a system wide version of TeXLive ?
The method I outlined in my initial messages worked, but documents that used to work now have serious partial working packages. e.g. ams mathematics packages throw errors on simple calls like \begin{theorem} \end{theorem} which is absurd.
I never had this problem with old LaTeX distributions using texhash.

[mas]

You may like to re-read my last sentence. Install TeXLive directly from ctan, or an iso. It is very simple, and tlmgr works as expected.

Do you just off the top of your head the steps how to install on Unix or Linux a system wide version of TeXLive ?

Download the iso, mount it as root, run install-tl. You are done. Run tlmgr as needed. I do no think it can be simpler than that.

When installing, I *always* choose to install the full distribution which takes ~3 GiB of space, which is not a big thing nowadays. By doing this, I am sure that all the packages (except non-free) are installed, and will be updated on subsequent tlmgr runs.