[tex-live] texlive on Raspberry Pi

[Johannes Hielscher]

Am Mon, 09 Apr 2018 10:27:44 +0100
schrieb Simon Dales <simon at getthingsfixed.co.uk>:

> Johannes,
> 
> On Sun, 2018-04-08 at 21:47 +0200, Johannes Hielscher wrote:
> > Addressing the patience with the bad I/O performance of mmcblk and
> > the flash modules themselves:
> > I would not hesitate to recommend just to take out the µSD, put it
> > into an ordinary PC, and ./install-tl the armhf-linux binary
> > distribution along with the native one there (you can delete it
> > from within your RPi if you don't need it any longer, e. g. to
> > compare the TeX performance of your SBC with dedicated PC
> > hardware).  
> 
> Have you actually tested this route?
Even the other way round. I installed TL18 pretest on a µSD plugged
into a Toshiba AC100 (armv7h, 512MB RAM minus what the GUI needs; maybe
relieved by the magic little word "zram", that comes preconfigured with
the AC100 Unbuntu image, and is definitively worth to be considered for
any low-RAM&don't-wanna-swap-to-flash constellation for the Yodas
amongst us).
No hassle at all (besides the slowness of course), I installed for
the platforms {armhf,x86_64,aarch64}-linux, and also tested them by
carrying the card to my desktop PC, an AArch64 SBC, and another armv7h
notebook.

Those tests were not comprehensive, but the few binaries ran fine and
found anything needed from texmf on the µSD.

In a portability view, this is indistinguishable from a network install
on, say, an NFS share. That also has worked seamlessly since I can
remember setting up shared TL via tlmgr.

> 
> Clearly you have to be really concentrating when setting the paths in
> tl-install/tlmgr. Else it stomps on your PC's own happy TeX Live
> installation.
That is true, as it is for any ordinary, local installation.
> 
> But does it make the right soft links, ls-R files etc?
Should it?
Please correct me, but I never needed more than
  export PATH="/media/sd/texlive/2018/bin/armhf-linux:$PATH"
and some patience on building formats when I ran the binaries for the
first time (and, in case of LuaTeX, a whole lot of extra patience for
the font database).
> 
> For other jobs I would agree.
> 
> > The bandwidth of carrying around mass storage devices is
> > unmatched.  
> 
> Sneaker-net's king. An artic could grab big bandwidth if it rocked up
> at CERN. Big latency on the M25.
RFC 1149 (-:
> 
> //////////////////
> 
> Simon
>