[tex-live] TexLive 2015 DVD comments

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Thu Sep 3 23:19:26 CEST 2015


On 2015-09-03 at 15:52:34 +0200, Siep Kroonenberg wrote:

 > The main screen of the text installer does tell you the required
 > disk space:
 > 
 > <C> customizing installation collections
 >      47 collections out of 48, disk space required: 4021 MB

BTW, during a network installation more space is required because all
downloaded .tar.xz files are removed when the actual installation is
finished.

When someone asked for an installation scheme which only supports the
new engines (XeTeX and LuaTeX), I experimented a bit with the
collections menu.  It turned out that it's not so easy to create a
reasonably small subset.  The reason is that fonts and documentation
consume a lot of space.  Maybe more optimization is possible if you
exactly know in advance what you need.  One could, for example, remove
support for all languages one doesn't understand, or remove ConTeXt if
not needed.  However, don't be disappointed if you don't save as much
space as you expected.

Peter, you said that you are running Ubuntu under Windows.  I suppose
that Ubuntu is running in a virtual machine.  If you need TeX Live on
both systems, it's sufficient to install it under Ubuntu but with
binaries for both systems.  On Windows you can mount it via Samba,
hence only the binaries have to exist twice on your machine.  This
saves a lot space.

Disk space is cheap nowadays.  But if you can't replace the disk for
some reason, you can at least use a USB stick as an additional disk.

This makes only sense on Unix because Windows doesn't mount USB sticks
and thus there is no file-system cache and everything is horribly
slow.  On Unix, however, you can even read a file from a USB stick
before it had been written to it.  Thus USB sticks can be used as
replacements for hard drives efficiently, at least on Unix.

Peter, I think that it's easier to add more disk space rather than to
fiddle with the TeX Live installer.  16 or 32 GB sticks are not very
expensive and even 64 GB sticks are affordable.  If you consider to go
this way, let me know.  I'll provide more information then.

Regards,
  Reinhard


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