This page used to contain experimental versions of MacTeX. Now that TeX Live 2007 has been released to the internet, you should obtain MacTeX from the official site, www.tug.org/mactex. MacTeX can also be obtained from CTAN by going to www.ctan.org, clicking on the "our directories" link, and then on "systems" in the left hand column, and then on "mac", and finally on "mactex." But this procedure is automated on the MacTeX site.
Three MacTeX install packages are available from the MacTeX web site. These packages are completely compatible with Gerben Wierda's new gwTeX release and the old MacTeX release of 2006, with support for multiple TeX distributions on a single machine written by Gerben Wierda and Jerome Laurens.
The available packages are listed below. We do not provide links here because we want users to go to the MacTeX site or CTAN.
The MacTeX package has a custom install option, so for instance it is possible to install the GUI programs without installing the other pieces.
Installing one TeX distribution does not overwrite the others, so it is possible to install all distributions and experiment. For most users the distribution used will not make any difference. All distributions use ~/Library/texmf for local additions to the texmf tree; files can be added here without running texhash, exactly as in earlier distributions. All distributions work on Intel and PowerPC, using system 10.3 and higher. All distributions contain xeTeX.
After installing, you need to reconfigure your GUI applications to use the new TeX distribution. A README file installed in /Applications/TeX explains the simple configuration steps. Basically, this involves setting the path to TeX binaries to /usr/texbin. After this configuration is done once, your GUI applications should work without change for all future TeX distributions on the Mac. Details are provided below.