TexLive 2010 in Fedora 13/14

Hilbert · #1 26th April 2011, 04:43 PM

I heard that one can get TexLive 2010 for Fedora using a special yum repository at http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/2010/. Does anyone have any experience with this?
What yum commands should one use to install it?
Does it automatically replace the default Fedora TexLive 2007 installation?

pete_1967 · #2 26th April 2011, 05:42 PM

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive

Mariusz W · #3 1st May 2011, 12:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hilbert

I heard that one can get TexLive 2010 for Fedora using a special yum repository at http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/2010/. Does anyone have any experience with this?
What yum commands should one use to install it?
Does it automatically replace the default Fedora TexLive 2007 installation?

Yes, I have and quite a lot of experience with Fedora TeXLive 2010 (and now also TeXLive 2011).

This vital component of any modern Linux I am sorry to report has been fairing with lots of ups and downs in Fedora 14. It seems to be maintained by a single person. There are times he is responsive, There are times he disappears for long.

Since last November the project has been plagued by so many critical show-stopper bugs, that as of today I hardly can recommend it to anybody in his own mind: you will spend lots of time fixing blunders of the sole maintainer that he is with frightening regularity introducing in his biweekly TeXLiVe repo updates. Those 'updates' by the way always mean massive re-dowloads and re-installs of a huge number of packages, most of this totally unnecessary, being the result of poor packaging, as only a tiny fraction of TeX packages usually needs updating within the period of a few weeks.

Even worse: every two-three such 'updates' and your TeXLive installation becomes totally inoperable: missing formats, conflicting config files, etc -- none of this being your own fault.

So in one word: TeXLive project seems for me currently to be by far the weakest spot in the Fedora landscape. That was not so when the main TeX distribution was tetex and the RedHat/Fedora Core tetex packages were maintained by different people.

Unfortunately TeX is a component of vital importance for lots of people in academia and engineering.

RupertPupkin · #4 1st May 2011, 02:28 AM

I agree with Mariusz W, the Tex Live 2010 packages for Fedora 14 are pretty screwy. There seem to be a lot of problems with duplication, packages that don't actually install anything, conflicts, and so on...enough to be a bit frustrating. The Fedora packager is trying his best, but TeX Live 2010 is a huge system and the packaging should probably be handled by a team of people.

I ended up uninstalling the Fedora packages and installing TeX Live 2010 directly, from the DVD iso file at http://tug.org/texlive/. The downside is that this is outside the Fedora packaging system, but the upside is that it works. Plus it includes the tlmgr update manager, which is not included with the Fedora packages. I think tlmgr is a better way of updating TeX Live systems, so having that is another bonus.

I've managed to work around the RPM dependencies on Fedora TeX Live packages without any problem. For example, to install the texinfo package, which has the Fedora TeX Live packages as dependencies, I just grab the latest texinfo RPM file from one of the repo mirrors and install it manually with rpm -Uvh --nodeps. This method has worked fine for me. Until the Fedora TeX Live 2010 packaging gets sorted out correctly, the direct installation is what I'll stick with. You don't even need to burn the iso to a DVD, you can mount the iso file and install from there.

rgaelzer · #5 24th May 2011, 05:54 PM

What about Fedora 15, for those who are using the texlive-release repo?
Will the automatic upgrade procedure performed by preupgrade return to the default texlive 2007 installation, or will it keep the 2010 version?

Mariusz W · #6 24th May 2011, 06:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rgaelzer

What about Fedora 15, for those who are using the texlive-release repo?
Will the automatic upgrade procedure performed by preupgrade return to the default texlive 2007 installation, or will it keep the 2010 version?

I haven't pre-upgraded yet. If what happened when I was pre-upgrading last time, from Fedora 13 to 14, is any indication, then I suspect you will be "pre-upgraded" to the same TeXLive version, and if, again, my last pre-upgrade experience can serve as an indication, then your TeXLive will end up totally broken, and you would need to rebuild it from scratch, which is really painful.

Fedora's TeXLive project has proved to be a complete fiasco, in my experience. Practically the only serious disappointment with Fedora. That's really sad.

snoze · #7 24th May 2011, 06:55 PM

in Fedora 15 some font problem, will update once the installation done..

Mariusz W · #8 24th May 2011, 07:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by snoze

in Fedora 15 some font problem, will update once the installation done..

The Fedora forum is not a chat line. Would you please make your future posts more up to the point. I suggest you familiarize yourself with the Fedora forum Rules & Guidelines (one of the rules is not to post garbage).

martih · #9 13th July 2011, 01:35 PM

Speaking about fonts, I've noticed that the TeX Live 2010 font somehow looks different on Fedora 15 than TeX Live 2010 on Fedora 14 (the Fuduntu "flavor" of Fedora 14, actually). On both boxes I have the jnovy repo enabled. I'm attaching two screenshots.

The difference is not big in the screenshots, but when you look at a whole page it makes a difference. The new font is not very pleasant to look at when displayed on a screen.

Anybody else has this problem?

RupertPupkin · #10 13th July 2011, 09:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by martih

The new font is not very pleasant to look at when displayed on a screen.

Try adding this to your preamble:

Code:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

Using the T1 font encoding makes a difference for me:

martih · #11 14th July 2011, 09:26 AM

Thanks RupertPupkin, this solved a big part of this problem. The normal text now looks fine.

However, typing math still looks wrong. I've attached two sceenshots of the same LaTeX document. The first screenshot was pdflatex'ed on F14 (Fuduntu, actually) and the other one on F15.

This is really weird, given that texlive is installed from the same jnovy repo on both boxes.

RupertPupkin · #12 14th July 2011, 10:22 AM

I've always noticed that problem with the default Computer Modern math fonts, even before F15. That's one of the reasons I use the fouriernc package. But if you want to stick with CM, then use the lmodern package, which is basically a heavier (and all-round better) version of CM:

Code:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

For comparison, here's what CM, lmodern, and fourier look like:

martih · #13 14th July 2011, 10:45 AM

Thanks RupertPupkin, this is extremely helpful. Following your advice everything now looks fine.

I might also try fouriernc in the future.

martih · #14 17th July 2011, 06:29 AM

Maybe the problem with the screwy bi-weekly updates described by Mariusz W can be solved by updating your system with

Code:

yum -x "texlive*" update

I'm aware this might not be an ideal solution/workaround, but it avoids the problems described by Mariusz W. (Of course you have to install texlive before this step, and this assumes that texlive works at least initially.)

If anybody has a better solution on how to deal with the jnovy repo problems, I would be interested in getting to know about it.

I also think it's a pity that Fedora is lacking in this key area and also shows other signs of neglect, e.g. unison apparently has no maintainer since F12. Both of these are key elements of any Linux system. Unfortunately, I lack both the qualification and the time to become more involved with Fedora, but at least I can provide some user feedback.

Hilbert · #15 24th October 2011, 12:27 AM

In the end I gave up on the Fedora repositories and installed TeX Live 2011 from the DVD. It was easy and produced a fully working TeX distribution in /usr/local/

1) Get the DVD from TUG. Make sure you have Perl-Tk installed.
2) As root, mount the DVD, and cd to its top level directory.

Code:

  umask 002
  perl install-tl -gui

2) Choose your customizations, and let it run.
3) If you want xetex to work,

Code:

      cp /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-var/fonts/conf/texlive-fontconfig.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive.conf
      fc-cache -fsv

4) To make this TeX Live distribution available to any given user, add the following to their .bash_profile:

Code:

PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/i386-linux:$PATH; export PATH
MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH; export MANPATH
INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH; export INFOPATH