[OS X TeX] Recommendations for downloading LaTEX

[Gerben Wierda]

On Jan 27, 2005, at 14:02, cormullion wrote:

> I’m trying to investigate LATEX, but I’m having difficulty installing 
> anything... :-)
>
> I’ve been recommended the i-Installer, but this doesn’t work for me. 
> It’s much easier for me (still on dial-up) to have resumable downloads 
> from a clearly clickable link on a web page than go through an 
> elaborate and largely-incomprehensible on-line installer. (I’m not 
> sure about granting administrator access while downloading remote 
> software either...)

i-Installer does not *use* admin rights for downloads (or anything that 
not really needs it, it uses a minimum contrary to many other installer 
which sometimes just restart themselves as root). The process itself 
never gets admin rights (which you can check because the only way it 
could get those is by restarting itself, this is why some installers do 
that). Only some subprocesses get admin rights.

If you are really worried, you can turn off admin rights for the 
install in Pkg Properties and change the install location to some 
location where you have ordinary write access. I would suggest creating 
/usr/local/teTeX by hand owned by yourself to stay close to the default 
setup.

If you do that, the TeX i-Package will install completely without admin 
rights. However, adapting system-wide paths will of course fail, so you 
need to do that by hand as well.

G

PS. The only reason i-Installer asks for admin rights before starting 
downloads is convenience for smaller packages. The downloads themselves 
still run non-admin. The activity tab will show you which processes run 
with admin rights (red) and which do not (black).

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