General ⇒ problem with using tikz in TeX Live under linux

[fenghedo]

Hi,

I have been using TeXnicCenter in windows with MikTeX. But it has turned real slow as I am doing a lot of pictures for compiling. So I want to try compile my files using our much faster linux server with KDE. We have TeX Live installed on the server (probably a long time ago). When I tried to compile my tex file by "pdflatex mytex.tex", it complains that it could not find the file "pgfplots.sty", which I used. It could also not find some other packages that I tried to use.

Since I don't have administration privileges on the server, I installed TeX Live 2008 in my local directory again. Then I installed the packages beamer, pgf and xcolor by putting them into the directory texlive/texmf-local/tex/latex/. Then I used "texhash [directory]" to rehash the directories for the packages I installed.

However, when I try to compile my tex file using the command "pdflatex mytex.tex", I can see that it was still using the old TeX Live installed a long time ago. Then it complained about the same thing (could not find the packages).

Could somebody tell me how I could solve this problem?

Thanks.

[frabjous]

Did you try editing your $PATH environmental variable to go first to where you installed TeXlive 2008 first, and other places only afterwards?

[fenghedo]

Thanks for your reply. I did do the following (I saw this in the texlive installation document):
PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/bin/i386-linux:$PATH; export PATH
MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH; export MANPATH
INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH; export INFOPATH
Instead of the /usr/local/... paths, I pointed to the local directory that I installed texlive 2008. However, I went in the directories and did not see any subdirectory under /texlive/2008/ that is called "bin" or "texmf". I only saw the following directories:
temp, texmf-config, texmf-var, tlpkg.

Did I fail the installation?

Did you try editing your $PATH environmental variable to go first to where you installed TeXlive 2008 first, and other places only afterwards?

[fenghedo]

Alright. I finally figured out what was wrong. My first try of installation did fail (I remember the command line saying something about configuration was not completed). I tried to install it again in my home directory and was successful. Then I tried to compile my tex file and it is proceeding normally.

But now I got a failed installation with all the files on my first try. Could somebody tell me how I can remove this installation. Do I just remove the whole directory?

Thanks for your reply. I did do the following (I saw this in the texlive installation document):
PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/bin/i386-linux:$PATH; export PATH
MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH; export MANPATH
INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH; export INFOPATH
Instead of the /usr/local/... paths, I pointed to the local directory that I installed texlive 2008. However, I went in the directories and did not see any subdirectory under /texlive/2008/ that is called "bin" or "texmf". I only saw the following directories:
temp, texmf-config, texmf-var, tlpkg.

Did I fail the installation?

Did you try editing your $PATH environmental variable to go first to where you installed TeXlive 2008 first, and other places only afterwards?