[tex-live] Where is the root dir of my Tex Live installation

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Mon Nov 18 11:22:35 CET 2013


2013/11/18 Gerald Pechoc <ubuntu at pechoc.eu>:
>
> With compatibility I meant for all, that the same components are installed
> on both my computers, so that a document should be rendered on both sides
> almost identically without additional installation of software components.
>
> That there are a lot of other compatibility problems too, I can see also.
>
> Important question for me now:
> How can I deinstall the existing versions of TEX on my Ubuntu machine?
>
> I want to reinstall with the Tex Live dvd from tug.
> A new install over the net is lasting to long with my slow internet
> connection.
>
> How to deinstall?
>
Just delete the tree and remove its path from the PATH variable. If
you made symlinks, you have to remove the symlinks. But wait, first
you should understand why the installation failed otherwise you will
be at the very same situation after installation from DVD. if you
really do not remember what you set as the installation path and you
do not have PATH properly set, you can find it by the "find" program.
On my computer the output is:

$ find / -name article.cls 2>/dev/null
/home/wagner/os2/E/emtex/texinput/latex2e/article.cls
/home/wagner/os2/F/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/home/wagner/Nobackup/tl-svn/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls

You can see that I have OS/2 version of emTeX, OS/2 version of teTeX,
TL subversion working copy, TeX distribution from the Linux distro and
7 versions of TeX Live. If I wanted to uninstall the latest TeX Live,
I would do it by:

rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/2013

The executable directory for me is /usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/x86_64
because I have 64bit Linux computer. You should find that directory
and look what is inside it.

Having found it reinstallation even over a slow net should be faster
than a new installation from a DVD if you run the network installer
and install to the same path. If I remember it well, the installer
will download missing or updated packages only.

Remember that no matter what the installation media is, you always
have to understand how to set PATH, otherwise TL will not work. If you
did ot manage to do it after network install, you will not be able to
do it after DVD install. And remember that the ISO image is old, since
its creation a great many packages have been updated. You will have to
use your slow net to update them. On the contrary the network
installer installs the latest version. Thus your tree from the network
installation is newer than what you have on the DVD. You will be
wasting both time and bandwidth if you install from DVD instead of
understanding what happend with your network install.


> Gerald
>
>
> On 2013-11-17 12:04, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>>
>> 2013/11/17 Gerald Pechoc <ubuntu at pechoc.eu>:
>>>
>>> I want to be compatible with my office computer, where 2013 on a MAC is
>>> installed.
>>
>>
>> What do you mean exactly by compatibility? I have LaTeX files written
>> more than 15 years ago and they were compiled by emTeX in OS/2 Warp
>> 3.0. Now I can compile these files in TeX Live in Linux (I really do
>> it because the publisher wants to publish some books again without
>> changes). Sometimes I do not have the sources, I find only DVI and EPS
>> images. The path to the images is absolute but Linux does not have the
>> E: drive. Yet it is possible to cope with it using a simple trick. The
>> incompatibility is the question only if you really need features of a
>> latest version of a package that was not available in the earlier
>> version or if you happen to trigger a bug in an older version that has
>> already been fixed in TL 2013. And if you need XeLaTeX and system
>> fonts, full compatibility can be achieved with great difficulties
>> only.
>>
>>> I am not a beginner in Latex, but I am not a very educated Unix Admin.
>>>
>> If you really are not satisfied with the TeX distribution from your
>> OS, you should certailny spend a few hours learning the basics of
>> shell, setting environment variables, basic utilities, and you have to
>> understand SELinux if you have it active. The incompatibilities will
>> arise in XeLaTeX when you start using system fonts. A few years ago I
>> developed a package for a journal and worked as a consultant. They
>> found that Mac had different version of DejaVu fonts and the whole
>> journal issue is one page shorter if compiled by XeLaTeX in Linux.
>> Anothe problem was with fi and fl ligatures that were correctly
>> created by XeLaTeX in Linux but not by XeLaTeX by Mac. They found that
>> they have newer version of DejaVu font and this was the source of the
>> bug on Mac. They downgraded the fonts to my version and thus fixed the
>> bug. I could continue with the list of OS specific bugs I found during
>> last few years. They were identified, reported and fixed by the
>> maintainers.
>>
>> I am writing this in order to show that according to my experience the
>> greatest problems with compatibility is outside TeX. If you want to be
>> compatible and platform independent while using special features, you
>> must first understand your OS. As Norbert wrote, if you are not a
>> package developer, you need not bother with the latest version.
>>
>>> Gerald
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2013-11-17 00:46, Norbert Preining wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> the sad thing is that ubuntu's current lts release offers tl 2009,
>>>>> only.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Umpf, ok, that is bad.
>>>>
>>>> But the OP problem I still believe that *this* is not a problem.
>>>> He seems to be a complete beginner. For those people 2009 vs 2013
>>>> does not change much.
>>>>
>>>> Norbert
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> PREINING, Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
>>>> JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
>>>> DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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