This answer is an adaptation of some notes I had taken combining cfr's and Silke's answers on How to install "vanilla" TeXLive on Debian or Ubuntu?.
It explains how to install and maintain TeX Live using a dedicated user account, in order to avoid potential risks to the system directories and your home directory.
Much of it is taken verbatim from those answers, and other things I am not interested in – such as making TeX fonts available system-wide – are described there.
1) Set up a dedicated user/group and create a suitable home for TeX Live
This method not only protects your system directories, it also protects your home. The tladmin user cannot write to your normal home directory.
Notes:
- this, the setting of
PATH and the installation of the fake package are the only parts you need root privileges for;
- in general, if you want to change anything under
/usr/local/texlive, su - tladmin before you do it. If you want to do something outside of users' home directories (e.g., in /etc), you need root privileges (sudo or similar).
1.1) Create the user
Note: If you have previously installed TeX Live from upstream, omit the -m flag from the following command.
sudo useradd -d /usr/local/texlive -m -r -U -s /bin/sh tladmin
This creates a new user, tladmin, as a member of a new group, also named tladmin. It creates a home directory for tladmin at /usr/local/texlive.
If you have previously installed TeX Live from upstream, once you have created the new user, do this:
sudo chown -Rh tladmin:tladmin /usr/local/texlive
Set the password for the new user
sudo passwd tladmin
If you wish, you may also restore user files from /etc/skel.
1.2) Hide the name of the new user from the login screen
Open /var/lib/AccountsService/users/tladmin (create it if necessary)
sudo vim /var/lib/AccountsService/users/tladmin
if the file already exists, make sure there's the line
SystemAccount=true
under the [User] section.
Otherwise, just write these two lines in it:
[User]
SystemAccount=true
2) Installation
Login as tladmin:
su - tladmin
then download and run the installer:
wget http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
tar xvfz install-tl-unx.tar.gz
rm -i install-tl-unx.tar.gz
cd install-tl-... *press TAB*
./install-tl
The command ./install-tl starts the installation process. You can change all kind of options there, anyway, most of the time the default options are correct.
In some cases changing the options can, of course, be helpful. Not installing the doc and source trees will save you a lot of disk space (around 50%). This comes with the downside of having to look up documentation online, instead of locally.
If you want to reduce disk space further you can also change the installation scheme or collections, but this will result in not having certain packages installed by default. You can, however, install them later through the TeX Live manager.
The only thing I personally like to change is the location of TEXMFHOME, using in ~/.texmf instead of the default ~/texmf, to make it hidden.
When you're done setting up the options, press i to start the installation. The full installation is likely to take a long time, about an hour even on a good connection.
After the installation has completed you can delete the directory with the installation files:
rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/install-tl- *hit TAB*
Interruptions
If, for some reason, the installation is interrupted it can probably be resumed by running the installer again. This will prompt you to continue the installation.
If you want to start the installation from the beginning it's probably wise to remove the following installed elements +/- possible elements mentioned in mcbetz's answer on How to remove everything related to TeX Live for fresh install on Ubuntu?.
rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/2019
Failures
Such a long installation process may fail due to interruptions in communications or other reasons.
In such a case, you may want to to restart the installation, but this time choose the smallest configuration that would get it going.
Then, you can install all missing components with tlmgr --gui.
3) Set the PATH
Note: on [1-1] there are instructions about how to avoid having to adapt /etc/profile.d/texmf.sh when you install a new edition of TeX Live, using a system of symbolic links.
In order to have working executables and man/info -pages, create the following PATH for finding your new TeX Live installation:
login as your normal user (in order to be able to use sudo)
su - <your user>
open or create the file /etc/profile.d/texlive.sh
sudo vim /etc/profile.d/texlive.sh
and write in it
# /etc/profile.d/texlive.sh
TeX_h0me="/usr/local/texlive/2019"
if [ $UID != 0 ]; then
[ -d "$TeX_h0me/bin/x86_64-linux" ] && export PATH="$PATH:$TeX_h0me/bin/x86_64-linux"
fi
unset TeX_h0me
This avoids adding TeX Live binaries automatically to root's PATH, as would happen if you set it in /etc/environment.
Log out, then log back in ("Files with the .sh extension in the /etc/profile.d directory get executed whenever a Bash login shell is entered (e.g. when logging in from the console or over SSH), as well as by the DisplayManager when the desktop session loads." [3-1]).
4) Fake the packages
You'll need to install a dummy-package in order to satisfy dependencies involving TeX Live components that have been installed by the TUG installer. Otherwise installing software that require those components will pull down texlive-* packages like crazy (see [4-3]).
Use the appropriate package among those listed on [4-1]. For TeX Live 2019 on Fedora 30 the one made for RHEL7 [4-2] does the job.
Unzip the archive and run
sudo dnf install /path/to/texlive-dummy[…].rpm
Then you should be able to install another package that depends on TeX without downloading tons of dependencies.
Other sources for dummy packages (which I’ve not tested) are
5) Test
Note: all of the following commands should work no matter which user runs them, except for tlmgr which needs to be run as tladmin.
If everything went well all TeX-related commands should work. Verify this by checking the output of
which tex
which should be
/usr/local/texlive/2019/bin/x86_64-linux/tex
Last time I installed TeX Live (v. 2019 on Fedora 30) which tex was failing because the test in /etc/profile.d/texlive.sh, [ -d "$TeX_home/bin/x86_64-linux" ], returned false. Check the permissions of directories in /usr/local/,
ls -l /usr/local/
it may be that texlive has rwx------ (700) permissions. If that's the case, run
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/texlive/
to fix the issue.
Try some other commands
man tlmgr
info tlmgr
tlmgr --version
pdflatex --version
biber --version
Another issue I had last time I installed TeX Live was Biber rasing this error:
biber: error while loading shared libraries: libnsl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
after installing libnsl it complained again:
biber: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
You can find which packages provide the missing files with
dnf provides libnsl.so.1
dnf provides libcrypt.so.1
then install them:
sudo dnf install libnsl libxcrypt-compat
6) Make your classes, packages and input files available to TeX Live
If you have personal classes, packages or input files, put them in ~/<your setting for TEXMFHOME>/tex/latex/ (you may need to create it). A symlink will do if you want to keep them stored somewhere else.
Note: files in the local texmf tree can bee loaded with just \input{filename} instead of \input{path/to/file}.
7) getnonfreefonts
Some typefaces are not distributed with TeX Live's installer due to licensing issues. Instead, you have to use a separate script, getnonfreefonts, to install them.
Notes:
- don't run
getnonfreefonts --user. It causes problems because it executes updmap (see [7-2]).
- it is possible to use all OpenType and TrueType fonts in other programs as well. To do that you have to add TeX Live fonts to the system configuration; see [2-1].
su - tladmin
wget https://tug.org/fonts/getnonfreefonts/install-getnonfreefonts
texlua install-getnonfreefonts
rm -i install-getnonfreefonts
getnonfreefonts --sys -a
Check if all the fonts have been installed correctly
getnonfreefonts --sys -l
If they have not, run
getnonfreefonts --sys -a
again.
8) Install Inkscape to enable the LaTeX command \includesvg
sudo dnf install inkscape
9) Update
su - tladmin
tlmgr update --self --all
Do not use sudo or switch to root. The whole point is that tlmgr runs as an unprivileged user and cannot touch your home or system directories.
APPENDIX
I) Upgrading to the next TeX Live
To upgrade you need to download and run the installer again, and to update the year in /etc/profile.d/texlive.sh
You can remove the old distribution(s) by running:
rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/<YEAR>
II) Uninstalling TeX Live
To remove TeX Live completely you need to undo everything you've done [2-1]:
III) Optional stuff
On [2-1] there are further instructions for
- making OpenType and TrueType fonts available to other programs;
- updading via GUI;
- creating a launcher (.desktop file) for Gnome to start the GUI updater.
If you want to use tlmgr --gui you'll need perl-Tk:
sudo dnf install perl-Tk
You might also need the dictionaries for Aspell (for instance if you use it in Emacs), which you can install with
sudo dnf install aspell-<lang1> aspell-<lang2> …
Have fun :-)
install-tl. – Zoxume Mar 27 '16 at 18:38