[tex-live] Installing TeXLive2008 on Cygwin

Angelo Graziosi angelo.graziosi at alice.it
Fri Aug 22 14:32:43 CEST 2008


Since the current texlive-20080822 hasn't Cygwin binaries, I have done
the following to install texlive under Cygwin using the script
'install-tl' (not the .bat file)

The main problem is that 'install-tl' does not find
'tlpkg/installer/lzma/lzmadec.i386-cygwin', which needs to decompress.

But Cygwin has its lzma package (and its 'tar' command works also with
'tar --lzma -xf...'!). So I have created the link

    ln -sf /usr/bin/lzma.exe lzmadec.i386-cygwin

In this way, choosing win32 binaries, 'install-tl' works fine to install
texlive in /usr/local etc..

Now a few questions.

Why does the installer not search if the system has its own lzma
package? This would avoid the above procedure.

If I install as Administrator (root), is there some TEXMF* dir which
should be writable by other users (non-admn.)? Mainly, this, perhaps,
regards TEXMFLOCAL.

Besides this, the win32 binaries seem to ignore the TEXMFHOME
($HOME/texmf) directory and use .texlive2008 in the user profile dir.

Any othe suggestions are welcome!

(Obviously the main way is to build texlive under Cygwin!)

Cheers,
    Angelo.


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