General ⇒ LaTeX on Ubuntu

[venik]

I have installed TexLive 2009 on Ubuntu 10.04 (64 bit), and would love to use its package manager (tlmgr). How do I install it? There seems to be no information about it.

Thanks--

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi venik,

if you installed the normal TeX Live 2009 you could start the tlmgr at the command prompt. Just open a terminal and type:

Code: Select all

sudo tlmgr

If you installed the version from the Ubuntu repositories, perhaps there's no tlmgr because Ubuntu uses its own package management. I didn't test the repository version yet.

TeX Live 2010 will appear soon, so I will install it from tug.org/texlive as well.

Stefan

[venik]

Here is what I got when I typed sudo tlmgr
tlmgr: command not found

I did install TL from Synaptic-- the cli installation seemed too involved.

Do I need to install the ENTIRE TL huge collection of packages to get tlmgr?

[frabjous]

There are different “schemes” you can choose from when you install TeXlive through tug.org/texlive, though it defaults to "full". There's a -scheme option for the installation script. E.g., I think you can put in "-scheme medium" for a medium sized install. I think, or hope, that if you start the installer with the -gui option there’s a GUI for choosing between the schemes, since I don’t know what they all are. I’ve never tried to install anything but a full installation personally so I don’t know what this is like, but presumably any way of installing texlive through the net installer from TUG would come with tlmgr, even a light scheme.

(EDIT: There's some info about the schemes available and choosing between them in the TeXlive 2010 guide here. If I were you, I'd stick with the packages you installed through Ubuntu until TL 2010 is released, and then switch over then. You can still install or update packages manually in the meantime if need be.)

[venik]

Thanks-- your advice coincides with my plan-- to wait until the 2010 version comes out (although there is no guarantee that the repository version will include tlmgr..)

[frabjous]

My suggestion was to wait until TL 2010 is released and then scrap the repo version and switch to installing directly then. There’s a good chance that TL 2010 will never be packaged for Debian/Ubuntu. TeXlive 2008 wasn't; they went right from 2007 to 2009. And even if it is, it’ll be long after TL 2010 is actually released at tug.org, and almost certainly won’t have tlmgr.