getnonfreefonts on a recent TL and Ubuntu

[Hefferon, Jim S.]

Paulo Ney,

I did number (3), thanks.

(My motivation is to give advice to people trying to compile my text, so I've imagined that (3) is the most common.)

Jim

...........................................................
Why are they not in jail?

________________________________________
From: Paulo Ney de Souza <pauloney at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 4, 2021 13:04
To: Hefferon, Jim S.
Cc: reinhard.kotucha at web.de; texhax at tug.org
Subject: Re: getnonfreefonts on a recent TL and Ubuntu

⚠ External Sender ⚠

Jim,

Can you tell us how you install TL? There are essentially 4 ways that people do that:

1- As a normal user, and leaving it like that
2- As a normal user and changing it all to root after installation
3- Executing TL install under "sudo"
4- Doing and "sudo bash" and executing TL install.

I am trying to see if I can reproduce your problem, and these 4 ways produce different installations.

Paulo Ney

On Sat, Sep 4, 2021 at 3:58 AM Hefferon, Jim S. <jhefferon at smcvt.edu<mailto:jhefferon at smcvt.edu>> wrote:
Reinhard,

Thank you for the reply.  Yes, /usr/local/texlive is owned by root.  Everything in /usr/local is owned by root, that I can see.  (I doubt that I did anything fancy when I installed, I am not a very sophisticated user and I tend to just follow the instructions.  Of course, I could have flubbed something up.)

A comment about what I am doing.  I have a textbook where people can download the source.  I am releasing a new version.  So I put a clean install on an old machine, and I am going through my INSTALL, checking that the instructions work.  In 2018 the instruction to install and run getnonfreefonts worked great, but not yesterday.

It sounds like I at least am not overlooking something obvious.  So thank you to you and Bob for the help.  In my INSTALL I am not going to suggest that people steal the local tree :-), so I will instead install Luximono by hand and include instructions for that.

Regards,
Jim

________________________________________
From: Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de<mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de>>
Sent: Friday, September 3, 2021 17:06
To: Hefferon, Jim S.
Cc: texhax at tug.org<mailto:texhax at tug.org>
Subject: Re: getnonfreefonts on a recent TL and Ubuntu

On 2021-09-03 at 19:46:15 +0000, Hefferon, Jim S. wrote:

 > Hello,
 >
 > I am trying to install Luximono to a brand new Ubuntu and TeX Live
 > installation (Ubuntu 20, TL 2021).  I am having trouble installing
 > getnonfreefonts.  No doubt I am missing some point, but I just
 > cannot see what.  (I am having some trouble with an email account,
 > so I apologize if this message is a dupe.)
 >
 > As described on https://tug.org/fonts/getnonfreefonts/, I used wget
 > to download install-getnonfreefonts to the current directory.  I
 > then tried to run texlua.
 >
 >   ftpmaint at Alonzo:~/Documents$ texlua ./install-getnonfreefonts
 >   Detected System: x86_64-linux Detected Installation:
 >   /usr/local/texlive/2021 mkdir
 >   /usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/scripts/getnonfreefonts ...
 >   [failed] Sorry, couldn't create directory
 >   /usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/scripts/getnonfreefonts
 >
 > (I made install-getnonfreefonts executable but that didn't change
 > the outcome.)  OK, maybe sudo?

Hi Jim,
yes, if /usr/local/texlive is owned by root...

 >   ftpmaint at Alonzo:~/Documents$ sudo texlua ./install-getnonfreefonts
 >   sudo: texlua: command not found
 >
 > Maybe it does not like the path?

AFAIK sudo does't use the PATH variable from the environment for
security reasons.

 >   ftpmaint at Alonzo:~/Documents$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2021/bin/x86_64-  linux/texlua install-getnonfreefonts
 >   lstat(./texlua) failed: ./texlua: No such file or directory
 >   kpathsea: Can't get directory of program name: ./texlua
 >
 > Even this did not work.

I don't understand why your system calls ./texlua (in your current
working directory) though you specified the full path.  I don't know
why this happens.  This should never happen because it's a big
security hole.


 >   ftpmaint at Alonzo:~/Documents$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2021/bin/x86_64-  linux/texlua /home/ftpmaint/Documents/install-getnonfreefonts
 >   lstat(./texlua) failed: ./texlua: No such file or directory
 >   kpathsea: Can't get directory of program name: ./texlua
 >
 > I note the kpathsea errors.  If it helps, my /etc/profile says this.
 >
 >   export PATH="/usr/local/texlive/2021/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH"
 >   export MANPATH="/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/doc/man:$MANPATH"
 >   export INFOPATH="/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/doc/info:$INFOPATH"
 >
 > Using sudo -s or sudo su gave similar results (and are at or past
 > the limits of my knowledge).  Googling around gave results from at
 > most 2016, and they didn't help.  Any ideas would be most welcome.

If sudo su doesn't work there seems to be something severely wrong
with your system.  It's the first thing I do after a Linux
installation in order to set the passwd for root so that I can log in
as root with su and without sudo.

The best you can do is to steal /usr/local and avoid sudo in the
future.  You still need it for Debian updates though.

/usr/local is for local additions and there is no need to be owned by
root.  The sole reason it's owned by root by default is that the Linux
installer is not aware of any users and, of course, only root can
decide whom to grant write access to particular directories.

So my recommendation is to steal the local tree:

   sudo chown -R jim:users /usr/local  (if jim is your login name)

If this works you can change files in /usr/local without sudo.  You
don't need and shouldn't use sudo for "tlmgr update" anymore.  And you
can install getnonfreefonts as a mortable user with TeX Live in PATH.
It's even more secure because a mortal user can't break the system.

But I'm concerned because you said that "sudo su" doesn't work for
you.  I hope that at least "sudo chown ..." works.  If not, your
system is broken and we have to examine the files in /etc.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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