[tex-live] installing TeXLive

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 9:01 AM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:
> Hi Herbert,
>
> On Fr, 12 Mär 2010, Herbert Voss wrote:
>> ./tlpkg/installer/xz/xzdec.i386-linux: (stdin): Unexpected end of input
>> tar: Das sieht nicht wie ein „tar“-Archiv aus.
>> tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
>
> Hmm, that seems *really* strange. Why?
>
> The packages you download are .xz compressed. So if the uncompress
> would have failed, then there should already be a warning message.
> Same with the download, the md5sums are checked. So all that is fine.
>
> Now, what remains is that either the xzdec at un-xz time creates something
> broken, which could be possible, or the tar file itself is broken.

Since the problem occurs for different packages, and others are not
reporting problems, it is more likely the tar extract is failing due
to some issue
in the VM's.  This could well be a resource constraint -- size of the
virtual disk
or RAM.   I've seen problems with VM's under Windows due to bugs in
iastore.sys.
These may be cured with  a  simple update if the IT people at your
site will allow
you to install updates.  Usually there are errors that can be found in
the Windows
event viewer.

> But we check our server in a daily cron script and during that unpack
> *all* packages, so we would see an error.
>
> Also ...
>> this might be a problem of VMware, which runs under Windows XP.
>> It was a bit curious, because it was not the same package
>> where the installer stopped on the different computers.
>
> due to the fact that it happens at different packages points to
> something very strange right in vmware/xp, and not by itself in
> the texlive. If the underlying OS/(pseudo)hardware makes problems,
> we cannot catch them.
>
> Sorry, bottomline of all that, no idea what to do.

It would be useful to know RAM requirements for TL installs.  I do
installs on a i386-linux box that has 1G physical and 2G swap space.

The OP could install TL on one (non-virtual) machine (with multiple
architectures if the machine is not the same as the VM's) and copy
the texlive directory to the VM's.

> Best wishes
>
> Norbert
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
> JAIST, Japan            TU Wien, Austria           Debian TeX Task Force
> DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia