[tex-live] porting a TeXLive-Installation to another PC

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 01:49:23AM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> Staszek Wawrykiewicz writes:
>  > On Sun, 23 Nov 2008, Andreas Hirsch wrote:
>  > 
>  > > I'm teaching a LaTeX-course at school and (as always) there are some
>  > > problems for the kids to get TeX running at home.
>  > > 
>  > > In special, some of my pupils have no or a bad internet-connection.
>  > > 
>  > > I've downloaded the iso - but this is freezed as of august 2008.
>  > > 
>  > > Is ist possible to copy an up-to-date installation of TeXLive to another
>  > > PC? Is changing the PATH-Variable enough for runnig?
>  > 
>  > The easiest way is to wget CTAN:/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008/archive/*
>  > and install-tl/ , record that on usb pendrive or dvd and install from 
>  > that.
> 
> Hi Staszek,
> unfortunately this is not as easy as it looks.  The installer will
> only work if the directory structure is exactly the same as on the DVD
> image.  This is not the case on CTAN.  The install-tl/ directory
> contains the installer, some documentation, and a tlpkg/ directory.
> But there is no texlive.tlpdb in install-tl/tlpkg/, hence some work is
> still necessary. 
> 
> I think that copying an installed system and ask people to run Siep's
> script is the easiest way in this case.

This script was intended as a proof-of-concept script to give users
on a LAN access to a pre-installed system to which they didn't have
write access.

It would probably work, but please review the code first: do you
want a file association tying psview to .[e]ps, are you going to use
xetex, what manuals deserve menu shortcuts? And, most importantly,
add a shortcut to tlmgr and make sure it works.

Also, how important is it really that the system is up to date? You
could just give them the DVD as-is, and most people would be happy
with it.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg