[tex-live] Installing TeX Live via Windows deployment

Siep Kroonenberg siepo at cybercomm.nl
Thu Feb 5 13:04:44 CET 2015


On Wed, Feb 04, 2015 at 10:07:36AM +0000, Lars Madsen wrote:
> Our IT department would like to be able to provide LaTeX via their windows deployment system (currently Win7)
> 
> I've been thinking a bit about this. Of course they can just run the installer. But I think they'll like something unattended and the net installer may fail. They could manage their own mirror (or I could do that for them, but again it installation is often very slow and might fail).

install-tl has a -profile option for an unattended install. The
source may be a local rsync repository. Then you would just have to
remove the TeX Live Manager menu entry afterwards and and lock
things down with ACLs. All of this can be scripted with minimal
digging around in the internals of the TL installer. You could
download and unzip a zipped repository from the LAN, if the
reliability of the LAN itself is a concern.

> (2) PCs with only one expected user, thus changes to c:\texlive should be allowed by the user

The GUI TLMGR tries to decide whether the permission level of the
user matches that of the person who installed the system. Things may
get messy if you try to get around that. Vista and later have
something called a virtual store, where registry- and filesystem
access is redirected to if the user does not have the necessary
permissions.  That has to be avoided at all cost.

So if a user of a single-user workstation is not an administrator, I
would keep it simple and make it a user install, and just accept the
inconsistencies croppping up in a roaming profile.

Alternatively:
c:\texlive should not get redirected, and install-tl has options not
to change the registry (path, file associations) and not to create
menu shortcuts. This could be delegated to something like w32client,
with a menu entry for TLMGR added, assuming that the IT people find
a good way to trigger such a script.

> I have not yet been through all the details of TLWinGoo so I don't quite know where the menu items and file associations go, are they added to USER or SYSTEM?

In an admin install, the menu items go to the all users menu, and in
a user install to the user menu. Path settings and file associations
go to the HKLM- and the HKCU registry hives respectively.

Admin or non-admin is first set when TLWinGoo is loaded. The
installer gui can change admin to non-admin ($opt_nonadmin).

By the way: user menus roam and path settings, but file associations
do not. For our installation, I had to devise a workaround for that.

But nowadays we have managed workspaces which try to manage file
associations but did not make things better.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg


More information about the tex-live mailing list