TeX Live and Debian/Ubuntu

(Status: 2011-04-18, np&mp)

Status of packages in Debian:
oldstable: TeX Live 2007
stable: TeX Live 2009
testing and unstable: TeX Live 2009

Ubuntu: Ubuntu 10.4 LTS and up have TL 2009. Prior versions have TL 2007.

Introduction

Here you can find information on the Debian packaging of the TeX live system, but also on how to install a "vanilla" TeX Live on your Debian system.

Please send comments and suggestions to the Debian TeX Task Force: debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org, (or if you think that is related to an genuine TeX live problem, to the tex-live mailing list).

Please use the Debian Bug Tracking System for reporting bugs of the packages.

For the changes since the last version please see the website of the package QA tracking system texlive-base, texlive-bin, texlive-extra, texlive-lang, texlive-doc.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please contact the Debian TeX Task Force at debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org. You can take a look at the svn repository, either on the web or via svn://svn.debian.org/debian-tex/texlive2009 (both for TeX Live 2009, for TeX Live 2007 use texlive-new).

We recommend using the distribution-provided packages, but if you like playing around we provide instructions for installing your own vanilla TeX Live on your Debian system.

Some Documentation

The Debian TeX Task Force has written two documents on TeX on Debian, available in the tex-common package.

For those not using Debian we provide these pages here, too:
Developers' Documentation: Debian TeX Policy
Sysadmins'/Users' Documentation: TeX on Debian

Talk at the EuroBachoTeX 2007: TeX (Live) on Debian

Some more docs can be found at pkg-tetex.alioth.debian.org, most interesting:

• Mapping existing teTeX dependencies to TeXlive packages
• TeX release goals for lenny
• Bugs in other packages that violate the TeX Policy
• Status of teTeX's bugs in the TeX-Live packages
• Packages that should be kept up-to-date on backports.org
• An unfinished document about configuration file handling is here

Installation

Installation is easy: Just call

	apt-get update
	apt-get install texlive

If you want to have a system closely mirroring a TeX Live DVD, you can install the texlive-full packages, which pulls in all packages. At the moment it can only recommend some packages I have updated (see above and below for updpkg), but later on - as soon as all these packages are fixed to work with texlive - thee will be real depends. I.e., do

	apt-get install texlive-full

Note that in Debian stable aka lenny there is TeX Live 2007, and in Debian testing/unstable there is TeX Live 2009.

Plans for future releases

Vanilla TeX Live on Debian

If you need or want to use the upstream TeX Live (with its new package manager, tlmgr) on your Debian system, you need to install it yourself (quick install instructions). Here is some advice in order for your local TeX Live installation to work fine with your Debian system.

1. Make sure your path is set up correctly and points to the TeX Live binaries (regardless of whether you are in a shell, a X session, etc.) You can set it system-wide in /etc/profile and /etc/login.defs. If you installed TeX Live as root, make sure root's path contains TeX Live too (otherwise tlmgr, updmap-sys, etc. will not work).
2. Tell APT about your local installation using equivs (see below) so that it doesn't try to install Debian's TeX Live packages as dependencies to other packages such as AucTeX or Kile. The only Debian packages installed should be tex-common, texinfo and perhaps lmodern (if you want those fonts to be registered system-wide and not just for TeX).

In order to tell APT about your locally installed TeX Live, you should build a dummy package using equivs. Here is a mini-howto.

$ aptitude install equivs # as root
mkdir /tmp/tl-equivs && cd /tmp/tl-equivs
equivs-control texlive-local
# edit texlive-local (see below)
$ equivs-build texlive-local
$ dpkg -i texlive-local_2009-1_all.deb # as root

At the step "edit texlive-local", you should change some information in the file, mainly the list of the packages provided by your local TeX Live installation. If you installed scheme-full except collection-texinfo as recommended, the file should look like this example.

Thanks

I would like to thank Frank Küster, Sebastian Rahtz and Karl Berry for supporting me in all the work!

That's it, enjoy it!