[tex-live] problem installing/configuring biber

Dirk Ullrich dirk.ullrich at gmail.com
Tue Jul 24 22:30:22 CEST 2012


Hello Clea,

2012/7/24 Clea F. Rees <reescf at gmail.com>:
> My apologies if this has been covered. I lost access to this list due
> to email issues and have resubscribed under a different account. I
> searched the archives and found one report of a problem but that
> thread suggested that that issue had already been fixed.
>
> Essentially, biber does not work for me. In TL 2011 this wasn't too
> much of a problem. I just used bibtex8 with biblatex. The new 2012
> release seems to be more of an issue - I can't get bibtex8 to work
> well with biblatex and biber still fails.
>
> I'm not quite sure what information to provide. I installed TL 2012
> through the net-install and tlmgr tells me no updates are available.
> I'm using 64 bit Arch Linux but I did not install texlive through the
> package manager but using the installer provided on the texlive site.
>
> biber --help
>
> produces no output. The exit code is 255.
>
[...]
> Note: I have semi-copied MacTeX's setup in a simplified form. So that
> /usr/local/texlive/bin and /usr/local/texlive/current are symlinks:
>
>  bin -> 2012/bin/x86_64-linux
>  current -> 2012
[...]
> perl is version 5.16.0-2 (-2 is a distro release number)
>
> Note that the texlive installation is entirely under
> /usr/local/texlive (apart from personal stuff under ~/texmf) and is
> owned by a dedicated non-privileged user (name: texlive, group:
> texlive).
>
[...]
> System: Linux 3.4.6-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jul 20 08:21:26 CEST
> 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> System is fully up to date.

I did another try to come more closer to your setup: I've installed TL
2010 via netinstall with a non-root user at `/usr/local/texlive' on my
up-to-date Arch Linux x86_64, and symlinked
`/usr/local/texlive/2012/bin/x86_64-linux' to
`/usr/local/texlive/bin'.

Even now
/usr/local/texlive/bin/biber --help
works as expected.

Could please send the list of packages installed on your Arch Linux
(can be generated, for instance, by `pacman -Q')?

Dirk


More information about the tex-live mailing list