8

As many of you know, Red Hat 6.4 comes with obsolete version of TeX Live from 2007. Unfortunately, TeX Live is dependency for many important packages we use in the Lab most notably R-3.0.2. Could anybody share the wisdom or point me to a document describing the installation of TeX Live 2013 on the Red Hat in the sandbox so that it doesn't conflict with the default TeX installation?

I would be happy to test somebody's RPM only if they behave like Python 2.7.5 (unfortunately actual version is 2.7.3) RPMs vs obsolete system Python. Note also that changing the operating system is not an option as I am not doing this for fun or hobby.

14
  • 1
    ...and Red Hat attacks again.
    – juliohm
    Oct 25, 2013 at 16:05
  • 5
    What is wrong with installing it by hand, using the TUG installer and manually edit the system PATH, that's what we did with our systems.
    – daleif
    Oct 25, 2013 at 16:24
  • 1
    I think a lot of people have given up with regards to LaTeX from Linux dists, they usually have different agendas.
    – daleif
    Oct 25, 2013 at 16:35
  • 1
    @PredragPunosevac, a bit off-topic, I just feel sorry for Red Hat users in general, not because of this particular issue you've raised, but for many other obsolete software that comes with this distribution. If you're allowed to use an up-to-date Linux operating system, do so. Life is much easier, particularly for developers.
    – juliohm
    Oct 25, 2013 at 16:36
  • 1
    Pardon my question, are we talking about RHEL or the old pre-Fedora RH? Oct 25, 2013 at 16:58

1 Answer 1

6

I actually got a great answer to this question on the Springdale Linux formerly known as PUIAS Linux mailing list. I am posting it here so that community can benefit from the answer.

Hi Predrag,

What we have done in our environment is download and install the latest texlive from TUG onto an NFS share, then we use environment modules to handle the user's environment variables (PATH,MANPATH,INFOPATH).

  • Download TeX Live from http://www.tug.org/texlive/
  • Run the install-tl script
  • Install the environment-modules package from the computational repository
  • In the modulesfiles directory, create a texlive directory, then create a file called 2013
  • The 2013 file should look something like:
#%Module1.0#######################################################################
#
#
module-whatis   "Loads settings for the TeXLive 2013"
prepend-path    PATH            /usr/local/tex/texlive/2013/bin/x86_64-linux
prepend-path    MANPATH         /usr/local/tex/texlive/2013/texmf/doc/man
prepend-path    INFOPATH        /usr/local/tex/texlive/2013/texmf/doc/info

Your path will depend on where you install your distribution.

  • Now you can use "module load texlive" to load the latest texlive
  • You can have multiple files in the texlive directory (e.g. 2011, 2012, etc.), which would allow you to load different distributions if you like, "module load texlive/2012"

Hope that helps.

Thanks, Theresa

1
  • 2
    I tried to format the code in a more sensible way, but the question marks seem wrong
    – egreg
    Oct 27, 2013 at 20:24

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .