[tex-live] The suggestions (from tex-d-l) (Re: Comment on Re: TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation))

[Sanjoy Mahajan]

> On that day (night) I installed a debian (via netinstaller-CD) for a
> friend. It took a while, but not very long.  After I installed some
> additional programs he wanted to have, I said, he needs TeX also,
> it's an absolute MUST-HAVE.

Courtesy of Norbert and the rest of the Debian TeX team, there are
/fantastic/ texlive 2007 (including ConTeXt) packages in Debian
'unstable' or at people.debian.org:

  deb http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ tl2007/
  deb-src http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ src/

  deb http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ lmodern/
  deb-src http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ lmodern/

  deb http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ context/
  deb-src http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ context/

Or if you're feeling braver and want to run the latest versions:

  deb     http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ test/
  deb-src http://people.debian.org/~preining/TeX/ test/

It takes maybe 10 minutes to install.  Why use the texlive DVD at all
if you are on Debian (or Ubuntu)?!

Well, I can think of one reason: If you are running Debian etch
(a.k.a. stable), then you won't be able to use the people.debian.org
packages much longer due to libc and libpoppler version requirements.

I made Ubuntu backports for edgy (6.10 = Oct 2006) and feisty (7.04 =
Apr 07), but they probably won't work on Debian etch.  And I haven't
been able to backport them to an old-enough version of Ubuntu yet with
a libc6 that would work with etch packages.

-Sanjoy

`Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)