[tex-live] [tlpmgui] tlpmgui starts in the wrong mode under Win32

[Michael A. Peters]

On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 15:26 +0100, Zdenek Wagner wrote:

> >
> I wanted to say that the owner of texmf-dist is root and permitions
> are 0755 (I hope I remember it well). Thus for normal users it is read
> only.

Just a note - on the very good advice of someone on this list, I set it
up differently. I made a user called texlive (imaginative, eh?) and that
user is the one with write permission on the tex trees.

An added bonus to this is that I do not have to add the bin/i386-linux
to roots path in order to administer the texlive system. But the real
benefit is that administration of texlive involving either a user error
or a software bug can only result in damage to the texlive system, and
never the operating system or user data.

> 
> > This is a valid argument.  However I'm not sure whether normal users
> > actually install different versions in parallel, or whether it's not
> > equally "normal" to want separate partitions for programs and data.
> >
> Probably only a few expert users do so but I am not sure.

In Fedora, "normal" users do what the OS installer offers to do by
default, which is usually a separate /boot and then a single volume
group using all remaining space split into two logical volumes - one for
swap and one for the rest of the filesystem.

Personally I think that scheme is garbage, as it makes a clean install
require restoring user data from backup - and the Fedora installer could
do a better job. root partition should generally need no more than a 6
GB lvm and THAT'S being generous IMHO. If server packages that serve
content from outside a home directory are to be installed (like MySQL or
posgresql) then a LV for /srv should be created. A LV for /home should
definitely be created.

It's hard for an installer to accurately guess how big they should be,
but that's the beauty of LVM - it does not have to guess. Go small and
leave the rest of the volume group unused. The user can grow /home
and/or /srv as needed.

When noobies pay me to help them install, I set it up that way and
explain to them why - and I set up /home to be 1GB. Before I leave, I
have them go into the LVM manager (fedora has a nice gui tool) and
grow /home so that they know how.

But that's nothing to do with texlive.
I like that texlive can be all on one partition, even if it breaks TDS
compliance. Let the OS vendors worry about TDS compliance in their
repackaging (where they should).

> 
> > > I always prefer if related files are together. If I wish to remove TL,
> > > I just remove one tree, not files from several trees.
> >
> > It seems the installer needs an uninstall option...
> >
> Windows users are accustomed to Add/Remove programs so an unistall
> option will be natural for them (I believe).

pushd /texlive
rm -rf 2007
popd

works for me. :)