Portable usage of TeX Live

Various things can be done with DVD or USB instantations of TeX Live.

Running from USB

You can run the normal TeX Live installation and make the output directory be a USB stick. Then you do several things:

• Use the tl-portable script to run completely from the stick, without touching the host system at all. As described in the documentation, tl-portable starts a new shell (command prompt) within which you do your work.

• Do a simple (complete) copy of the stick to a hard drive on another computer. The only sticking point should be XeTeX's access to system fonts, which is inherently system-dependent.

• Create a texmf.cnf file at the root of the TeX Live installation on the stick redefining paths to all refer to the stick:

  TEXMFLOCAL = $SELFAUTOPARENT/texmf-local
  TEXMFHOME = $SELFAUTOPARENT/texmf-home
  TEXMFCONFIG = $TEXMFSYSCONFIG
  TEXMFVAR = $TEXMFSYSVAR
  ASYMPTOTE_HOME = $TEXMFCONFIG/asymptote
  

  Then, running TeX from the stick will be self-contained.

Running from DVD

• The installation script has an option for running from DVD. This option is intended for when you don't want to install the full TL on your hard disk for some reason. However, it still requires a local directory for generated files, such as the formats.

• You can run the tl-portable script at the root of the DVD when you are a guest on someone else's system. It still needs to generate files, but they are all put into the directory ~/.tlportable2009 (where ~ refers to the HOME environment variable on Unix-like systems, and USERPROFILE on Windows). The rest of the system will be unaffected.