Introduction to TeX Live and its installer
The TeX Live package is a
comprehensive TeX document production system. It includes TeX,
LaTeX2e, ConTeXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX and many other
programs; an extensive collection of macros, fonts and
documentation; and support for typesetting in many different
scripts from around the world.
This page is for people who wish to use the binary installer to
provide the programs, the scripts, and a lot of supporting files
and documentation. The installer is updated frequently, so any
published md5sum will soon be out of date. Newer versions of the
installer are expected to work with these instructions, for so long
as they install to a 2021/ directory.
There are two reasons why you may wish to install the binaries in
BLFS: either you need a smaller install (e.g. at a minimum plain
TeX without LaTeX2e, ConTeXt, etc), or you wish to use tlmgr to get updates whilst this
version is supported (typically, until April of the year after it
was released). For the latter, you might prefer to install in your
/home directory as an unprivileged
user, and to then make corresponding changes to the PATH in your
~/.bashrc or equivalent.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-11.0
platform.
Package Information
Recommended
GnuPG-2.2.29 (to validate both the initial
downloads, and also any updates you might later make using
tlmgr.)
Recommended (at runtime)
The binaries are mostly linked to included static libraries or
general (LFS) system libraries, but a few of the programs and
several scripts will fail if the following packages are not
present:
ghostscript-9.54.0 is dynamically loaded
by the external application dvisvgm, which is used by asy when that creates SVG files.
Xorg
Libraries and libxcb-1.14 are needed for inimf, mf, pdfclose,
pdfopen and xdvi-xaw. But if you are using asy, or using a
TeX engine to create a PDF file,
you will need an X Window
System (for PDF files, this is to support a PDF viewer of your
choice, for example epdfview-0.1.8).
The binary version of asy needs
Freeglut-3.2.1.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
As always with contributed binary software, it is possible that
the required dependencies may change when the installer is
updated. In particular, these dependencies have only been checked
on x86_64.
Python-2.7.18 is used by many scripts - most
are unmaintained. Many invoke /usr/bin/env
python, a couple invoke /usr/bin/python. It is not generally known if
these will work with a symlink to python3 (as used in some distros)
and two from pythontex invoke python2. Ruby-3.0.2 is used by
some scripts, mostly within mtx_context which is part of
conTeXt, but also for one or two
others, such as match_parens, which are generally useful. The perl
module
Tk, which needs to be run from an X11 session to run the tests
and requires Tk-8.6.11.1, is used by one of the scripts for
ptex (Japanese vertical writing), can be used by a conTeXt texfind
script, and is needed for texdoctk (a GUI interface for finding
documentation files and opening them with the appropriate viewer).
User Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/tl-installer
Binary Installation of TeX Live
The TeX Live set of programs with
its supporting documents, fonts, and utilities is very large. The
upstream maintainers recommend placing all files in a single
directory structure. BLFS recommends /opt/texlive.
As with any other package, unpack the installer and change into its
directory, install-tl-<CCYYMMDD>. This directory name
changes when the installer is updated, so replace <CCYYMMDD>
by the correct directory name.
Note
The distribution binaries installed below may use static linking
for general linux system libraries. Additional libraries or
interpreters as specified in the dependencies section do not need
to be present during the install, but the programs that need them
will not run until their specific dependencies have been
installed.
With all contributed binary software, there may be a mismatch
between the builder's toolchain and your hardware. In most of TeX
this will probably not matter, but in uncommon corner cases you
might hit problems. e.g. if your x86_64 processor does not
support 3dnowext or 3dnow, the 2014-06-28 binary failed in
conTeXt when running LuaTeX, although lualatex worked, as did the
i686 binaries on the same machine. In such cases, the easiest
solution is to install texlive from source. Similarly, the x86_64
binary version of asy runs very slowly when
creating 3-D diagrams.
Now, as the root user:
TEXLIVE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/texlive ./install-tl
This command is interactive and allows selection or modification of
platform, packages, directories, and other options. The full
installation scheme will require about 4.9 gigabytes of disk space.
The time to complete the download will depend on your internet
connection speed and the number of packages selected.
It has been established by debian that the python scripts in latex-make will work with python3, so update them to invoke
that by running the following command as the root user:
for F in /opt/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/scripts/latex-make/*.py ; do
test -f $F && sed -i 's%/usr/bin/env python%/usr/bin/python3%' $F || true
done
Command Explanations
test -f $F && sed
...: in a small install these files might not be
present, so test if they exist and if not return 'true' to avoid
any error if this command has been copied into one of your own
install scripts.
./install-tl --location
http://mirror.aut.ac.nz/CTAN/systems/texlive/tlnet/: use a
variation of this if you wish to use a different mirror, e.g.
because you are in New Zealand but the installer chooses to use an
Australian mirror. The list of mirrors is at
http://ctan.org/mirrors.