[tex-live] Fwd: tlmgr on Ubuntu linux?

[Karl Berry]

    To update TeX Live on Ubuntu, I have to use root terminal ---sudo is  
    not enough in a regular terminal

I know this isn't very important to you, but FWIW, my guess is that the
subshell started by sudo is not seeing your PATH initialization, and
it's just something like /usr/bin and /bin.  E.g., if you set PATHl
(containing the /usr/local/texlive/2008-ish directory) in
.bash_login, sudo won't see it by default.

What I do myself is set PATH in .bashrc and have 
.bash_login source .bashrc (and .bashrc source .bash_login),
with some sentinels to avoid infinite looping, of course.

I.e., if your dot files are set up one way on MacOSX and another way on
Ubuntu, that could explain the difference.