TeX Live - Quick install for ChromeOS

If you don't want to bother reading the full install documentation and just want to install everything in TeXLive, on a ChromeOS system, a minimal recipe follows.

For more details on the commands given here, just keep scrolling down this page.

Configure Linux on the Chromebook

Open the Settings pane and locate the Linux Development Environment choice.

On some ChromeOS systems, it is located under:

• Settings > About ChromeOS > Linux Development Environment.

on some other ones, it is located at:

• Settings > Advanced > Developers > Linux Development Environment.

Then either click on Set up or Turn On depending on the version you have and then finish the set-up by choosing a login and a disk size.

Then click Install which will proceed to set up the environment.

The installation will finish by offering you a Terminal Window as:

If you close it by any reason, you can re-open it by going to the applications menu and choosing Terminal, and then choosing Penguim.

At this point you can do a few things to make the installation easier. In the terminal window, do:

1. sudo apt-get install wish
2. sudo mkdir /usr/local/texlive
3. sudo chown myusername:myusername /usr/local/texlive

The installation of wish here is needed for the GUI version of the installer.

Download the installer, unpack it, and then proceed to running the TeXLive installer, as in the Unix installation instructions.

Installation using the GUI

1. cd /tmp # working directory of your choice
2. Download: wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
              or: curl -L -o install-tl-unx.tar.gz https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
   (or via whatever other method you like)
3. zcat < install-tl-unx.tar.gz | tar xf - # note final - on that command line
4. cd install-tl-*
5. ./install-tl --gui # as root or with writable destination
   # may take several hours to run
6. Finally, prepend /usr/local/texlive/YYYY/bin/PLATFORM to your PATH,
   e.g., /usr/local/texlive/2024/bin/x86_64-linux

If you prefer a non-interactive installation

Do instead:

• perl ./install-tl --no-interaction # as root or with writable destination
  # may take several hours to run

Changing defaults:

• The default paper size is a4. If you want the default to be letter, add --paper=letter to the install-tl command.
• By default, everything is installed (7+GB).
  • To install a smaller scheme, pass --scheme=scheme to install-tl. For example, --scheme=small corresponds to the BasicTeX variant of MacTeX.
  • To omit installation of the documentation resp. source files, pass --no-doc-install --no-src-install to install-tl.
• To change the main installation directories (rarely needed), add --texdir=/install/dir to the install-tl command. To change the location of the per-user directories (where TEXMFHOME and others will be found), specify --texuserdir=/your/dir.
• To change anything and everything else, omit the --no-interaction. Then you are dropped into an interactive installation menu.

For more information on download, cleanup, post-install, updates, etc. see the Unix installation pages.