[tex-live] Re: [tug-board] Any news of DVDs ?

[gnwiii at gmail.com]

On 1/26/06, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:

> Dear Robin/all -- Khanh didn't answer my message as to where her
> ("our") copy of TeX Live 2005 might be, so rather than waste Robin's
> time and TUG's postal budget, I downloaded a copy and burnt a
> DVD for myself.  I /would/ have downloaded from CTAN had there
> been any useful information as to how to un-BZ2 it, but there
> was none, so I downloaded the straight ISO file from Aarhus.
> Is there any /real/ reason why ZIP compression (which is
> universally understood) cannot be used rather than the obscure
> "BZ2" compression method ?

It wouldn't occur to me that .bz2 is "obscure" to some people, but I
spend as liitle time as possible on Win32.   I agree with Hans that
bzip2 binaries (or links) should be provided in the directory with the
.iso.bz2 files.

> My main comment concerns the /unbelievably/ long time it took
> to install (compared to previous releases).  Yes, I chose the
> "full" option, but then deselected all language other than
> English, CJK & Vietnamese and removed any packages I didn't
> want (e.g., Ghostscript, Pictures, TeXinfo, ...), so what I was
> installing should have been comparable to what I have installed
> previously.  As far as I could judge, it was between five and
> ten times slower than the previous installer.  Is this a known
> issue, and are there any plans to improve installation speed ?

Was the disk fragmented?  This seems to be a big problem with NTFS.
Win32 users expect to rebuilt systems from scratch early and often, so
install speed matters.  Linux installs are done rarely so speed is
less of an issue.

I have now done a number of installs of TL2005 for linux+irix using
linux (via the script) and Win32 for Win32 (using the GUI), mostly on
a batch of identical 2GHz P4 machines, but also on 600 mhz PIII linux
machine.  The Win32 install takes much longer but not more than 2-3x
longer (NTFS disks were defragmented before installing).  I attribute
this to McAfee, but different files are needed (e.g., ghostscript on
Win32, linux+irix binaries on Linux).

--
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia