[tex-live] Installing TeXLive2008 on Cygwin

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Angelo Graziosi writes:

 > In this way, choosing win32 binaries, 'install-tl' works fine to install
 > texlive in /usr/local etc..

Good to hear.  However, xdvi is still missing.  You can download
the Cygwin binary from:

  http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/support/xdvi4cygwin.tar.bz2

The files are supposed to be extracted in the Cygwin bin directory.
The binary is compiled on Cygwin and is linked against various
cygwin*.dll's.  It also requires an X server.  It will not work on
native Windows.  This is the reason it's not shipped with all the
other win32 binaries.

 > Now a few questions.
 > 
 > Why does the installer not search if the system has its own lzma
 > package? This would avoid the above procedure.

Anwered by Karl already.
 
 > If I install as Administrator (root), is there some TEXMF* dir which
 > should be writable by other users (non-admn.)? Mainly, this, perhaps,
 > regards TEXMFLOCAL.

TEXMFLOCAL is supposed to be maintained by the administrator.  It
should not be writable by users.  Even if you trust all users, people
can damage things accidentally.

 > Besides this, the win32 binaries seem to ignore the TEXMFHOME
 > ($HOME/texmf) directory and use .texlive2008 in the user profile dir.

Coud you run

  getnonfreefonts --help

and tell me where it wants to *install* the fonts?

I get

[...]
  Directories:
       temporary: '/tmp/501-reinhard/getfont-<PID>'
       install:   '/home/reinhard/texmf'

 > (Obviously the main way is to build texlive under Cygwin!)

I tried it already.  AFAIR the Cygwin environment had a copyright note
from 2007, hence it's quite up-to-date.  I succeeded to compile TeX
Live with the configure options --without-xetex --without-dvipdfmx.

Most likely the reason that building xetex and dvipdfmx failed is
that some libraries had been missing or had been too old.

If you are able (or anybody else) to compile TeX Live under Cygwin,
let us know.  It would be nice to have binaries linked against
cygwin*.dll because many things (signals, for instance) don't work
properly, if at all, when linked against Microsoft's runtime lib.

Cygwin is currently not supported by TeX Live.  However, if you steal
win32 binaries, then please also run

   bin/win32/symlinks4cygwin.sh 

which creates symlinks to the scripts.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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