[tex-live] Installing latest TeX Live on Ubuntu

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/2/27 Axel E. Retif <axel.retif at mac.com>:
> On 02/27/2012 03:36 AM, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>
>> Remember, that tl-install
>> looks where you want to install TL and writes tha absolute paths to
>> certain files, not the symlink. Thus if you move the TL tree to a
>> different location and modify the symlink, TL will not work properly,
>> you will have to fix the paths.
>
>
>
> Oh! Thank you for this data. Then I think taring and untaring will still be
> my way, as I keep old TL distributions as a safety net ---once I was in a
> hurry to modify an ``old'' document, and I had not the time to investigate
> why I was getting different line and page brakes (later I found out it was a
> change in babel/spanish), so I reverted to TL 2007 on my Mac and everything
> went fine.
>
In order to be precise, TL honours symlinks. Consider you install TL
2007 to /usr/local/texlive/2007. Later you tar it and store somwhere
and delete from the disk due to lack of space. Now you have to use it
but you have enough space in another partition only. If
/usr/local/2007 will be a symlink to a new location, TL 2007 will
work. My case was different. Due to bad planning and lack of space in
/usr/local I installed the texlive trees to another partition and
/usr/local/texlive was a symling. Two weeks ago after some cleaning I
decided to remove the symlink and to move the trees physically to
/usr/local/texlive. Now certain directories in certain files pointed
to the absolute paths that no longer exists. It could be solved by
having the previous "texlive" root directory as a symlink to
/usr/local/texlive but in order to to make a big mess I fixed the
paths. It was not difficult if you know how to use which, kpsewhich
and fc-cache and can find where the paths are defined (it affected
mainly OpenType fonts for XeTeX).

>
> Best
>
> Axel
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz