[tex-live] Alternative to .iso?

[Karl Berry]

    Here are rpath we would like to automate the process of downloading and 
    installing the texlive content

Cool, glad you're interested.

    To mount an .iso file requires root privileges

I certainly might be wrong, but I was under the impression you could
create an fstab entry that allowed non-root to do a mount.  I've never
actually done it for an iso, though.

    Is the texlive content available as a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 archive?  Or 
    is there another option I have overlooked?

If you want the last released version, Reinhard's wget suggestion will work.

You can also use rsync, 
for either the last release (rsync tug.org::texlive-Contents) 
or the current sources (rsync tug.org::tldevsrc).

Hope this helps.

Karl