[tex-live] Running Live - no access to C drive

[poti giannakouros]

Dima <dmitrij.ledkov at gmail.com> wrote: 
As far as I understand now:

1) it is possible to avoid using C drive during initial small preference installation to run Tex Live of DVD

2) In order to do this you need to generate those preference/must have files first and put them somewhere the DVD can access it ie the DVD itself or flash drive or like network drive 

If 1 and 2 are right can someone please explain in detail step/by step how to achieve this. And is there a simple procedure to do that (ie some exe program which will do all of that)???? BTW i know nothing about emacs. 
If you have a computer on which you have write access to the C drive, and if 
 your are using A4 paper, you can reproduce what I did by: 
 
 1) running setuptl/tlpmgui.exe and selecting the 'run from DVD' tab. 
 
 2) Then copy texmf-var  to your media
 3)  set the environment 
 variables as Siep said:
 
 via Settings / 
 
Control Panel System / Advanced tab / Environment variables.
 4) The variables in capital letters in my emacs startup file are the environment variables you need to set. 
 
 5) The paths starting with D: or C: are the paths you need to set. Of course, use only a single backslash (\) and set the path and drive letter according to the setup you will be using. 
 
 I may be wrong about the TEXMFVAR variable, as tlmpgui.exe seemed to imply "texmf-var" rather than "D:\texmf-var." 
 
 Unless you know enough DOS to find some way to set the variables automatically each time, (I could not do it with autorun.inf)  you will have to do so each time by hand. 
 
 I am not sure if this will work for sure, for example on the test file I mentioned,
 but it is a place to start. 
 
 Good luck.
 I will comment on some of George N. White's comments below.
 
 
  
> I use TexLive through emacs, so I set my environment variables in
> site-lisp/site-start.el
> as follows (I am just starting to learn emacs lisp, so corrections are 
> welcome):
>
> (setenv "PATH" (concat (getenv "PATH")
>
> ";D:\\bin\\win32\\gs\\gs8.54\\bin;D:\\bin\\win32\\dviout;D:\\bin\\win32"
> ))
> (setenv "GS_LIB" (concat () 
> "D:\\bin\\win32\\gs\\gs8.54\\lib" ))
> (setenv "TLroot" (concat () "D:\\" ))
> (setenv "TEXMFVAR" (concat () "D:\\texmf-var" ))
> (setenv "TEXMFTEMP" (concat () "C:\\WINDOWS\\Temp" )) 
> (setenv "TEXMFCNF" (concat () "D:\\texmf-var\\web2c" ))
> (setenv "PERL5LIB" (concat ()
> "D:\\perlt\\lib;D:\\perltl\\site\\llib" ))

 
 

On 3/4/07, George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote: On 3/4/07, poti giannakouros <potiatpotisdotorg at yahoo.com> wrote:


It sounds like you have a good start.  Emacs is helpful because you can
run commands in a *shell* window and capture many pages of output
for analysis.  There are several ways to debug tex file searching. In 
my experience most problems are caused not by missing files, but by
tex finding the "wrong" file -- often an older version left in a
user's personal texmf tree or mixed in with the source files.
     
 
 Yes, my files appear to be in the right places (in texmf-var). There have been 
 no other TeX installations on these machines, aside from what I have done testing tlpmgui.exe. I suspect I am not understanding how internal scripts are interpreting the TEXMFVAR environment variable. I cannot try until I get to the
 lab, but thanks for the direction. 
 
 
       
I have a couple concerns, however.  What happens if the DVD
reader isn't drive D:?  It should be possible to put a live tree on
DVD, a network drive, or a USB disk.  Do you have to burn a DVD in
order to test the setup? 
   
  I have gone through a big stack of DVDs trying to get whole suit of tools right. The whole thing fills a DVD right up to the edge. TexLive plus emacs alone I can get onto an 2.3 G MO disk, so that is a little easier to test, though it helped to be on read only media with the right letter to be sure I was not overlooking something. Regarding the letter, I do not know enough (Windows XP + emacs lisp) to grab the "self" drive letter and use that. What I have my users do at the moment is basically to copy the drive letter specific settings to %HOME% in a _emacs file in which they replace-string on the drive letter. 
 
 
       
There have been postings on configuring emacs to use the "pdfopen" and
"pdfclose" utilities to ensure that acroread doesn't keep a .pdf file
open while your are trying to write over it.  This didn't work 
reliably for me a year ago -- emacs would randomly hang when launching
acroread.  Maybe things are better now (which version are you using?)
   
  I am using emacs 22.0.92.  It seems to be doing what you described, though I will 
 search for pdfclose and pdfopen for discussion of this problem.
 
 
 Thanks for the help.
 

 
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