[tex-live] Duplicate installation / tlmgr backup restore

[Axel E. Retif]

On  30 Mar, 2009, at 03:26, Nikos Platis wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am trying to duplicate an installation of TeXLive 2008 from my  
> older laptop to a new PC (both running the same version of Linux).  
> Is there an easy way to install the same packages that I have in the  
> old installation, in the new one?

What I used in Mac OS (from an old disk to a new one) was tar (in my  
case, with sudo, which MacTeX requires, but in Linux I also have  
texlive owned by root, with no problems); as a matter of fact, I  
tar'ed the whole /usr/local.

Best,

Axel

> I tried to use tlmgr backup --all in the old installation, transfer  
> all the generated lzma files to the new PC and use tlmgr restore  
> there.
> First, would this be a valid approach?
> Second, I found out that essentially tlmgr restore can only restore  
> one specific package of a specific version at a time, which in not  
> convenient at all in my case. I can probably create a script to do  
> the job, but it would certainly be nice to have tlmgr do it (for  
> example, I imagine that updating one package at a time would refresh  
> filename database each time, which is certainly a waste of time).
>
> Is there another solution? Now that I think of it, could I simply  
> copy over /usr/local/texlive ? (and what else?)
>
> Thanks in advance.