What I do across my machines is to manually install TeXLive in a system neutral directory. Something like /opt
(instead of /usr/local
which is the default for the TeXLive installer) will do. In my Fedora machine I even have /opt
in a separate partition so there is not even the need to reinstall TeXLive in case I reinstall Fedora. According to my experience I found that, even in linux distributions that package the latest TeXLive, it is easier to administer your installation through a central directory and you do not mess with the files of your distribution. Plus you get a working TeXLive package manager and you can update your TeXLive installation through it as you see fit.
For most Linux Standard Base distributions (such as Fedora) it will suffice to add a shell script in /etc/profile.d
to add your TeXLive installation to the PATH
so that you can have access of the TeXLive executables via the command line. For example in my Fedora machine I have created a /etc/profile.d/texlive2011.sh
shell script with the following content.
#!/bin/bash
# 32bit or 64bit ?
texarch=`uname -m`
# TeXLive installation directory. Edit accordingly
dir=/opt/texlive/2011/bin/${texarch}-linux
# Check if $dir exists and if yes add it to the $PATH
if [ -d $dir ] ; then
export PATH=$PATH:$dir
fi
You might need to mark it as executable (sudo chmod +x /etc/profile.d/texlive2011.sh
). A logout/login might be required as well.
:)