[tex-live] TeX Live 2011 release available

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 09:50:21AM +0200, Rolf Dieterich wrote:
> 
> Hi Karl,
> 
> > If anyone notices stale or missing information on the TL web pages, or
> problems with the release, please report as usual.
> 
> I have some suggestions (most of them are Windows specific).
> 
> 3. ISO (or DVD) installations
> According to
> http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-440004.3
> it seems straight-forward to build a live system on Windows. This sounds too
> optimistic.
> The main problem I see is that the texmf-var and texmf-config trees can't
> live in the non-writable medium. At least mkluatexfontdb, ConTeXt and
> TeXworks need write-access.
> I don't see how this problem is settled by the new tl-tray-menu.exe or the
> "Network TeX installations for Windows clients"
> (http://tug.org/texlive/w32client.html).
> 
> I noticed that there are differences to TeX Live 2010 where building a live
> system worked just fine. There was a tl-portable.bat which checked the
> existence of texmf.cnf in the home directory and called tl-install with the
> parameter -from_dvd (so to say a tiny second installation on the client
> machine). Nowadays this parameter doesn't exist anymore. I solved it for me
> by modifying the old tl-portable.bat (xcopying texmf-var and texmf-config
> from DVD to ~, setting the environment variables TEXMFSYSVAR and
> TEXMFSYSCONFIG accordingly and starting the TL shell).
> 
> Many thanks to the whole team for TeX Live 2011,
> Rolf

You can do one of two things:

1. create a completely self-contained usb stick installation, or

2. burn an existing normal, non-portable installation to iso or dvd

The self-contained installation has to be on a writable medium, but
the normal installation uses %userprofile%\.texlive2011 for
generated stuff and can therefore be copied to a read-only medium.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg