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 its
md5sum will change if it is newer than what is shown below. Newer
versions of the installer are expected to work with these
instructions, for so long as they install to a 2015/ directory.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-7.9
platform.
Package Information
Recommended (at runtime)
The binaries are mostly linked to static libraries such as
libc.a, but a few of the programs and
several scripts will fail if the following packages are not
present.
ghostscript-9.18 is dynamically loaded by
dvisvgm, which is used by asy, and
also by asy itself.
Xorg
Libraries and libxcb-1.11.1 are needed for inimf, mf,
pdfclose, pdfopen and xdvi-xaw. But if you are using asy, or using
TeX 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 optional non-wide-character ncurses library (for "some
binary-only application") from the bottom of the Ncurses page in LFS is needed by asy (only for i386) and also for xindy.run
which is used by xindy
The binary versions of asy need
GLU-9.0.0 and Freeglut-3.0.0.
If you are building for i386, the binary version of asy needs
FFTW, GLU-9.0.0 and
libreadline-5.2
: this only requires libreadline.so.5.2 which can be manually copied
from the lib/ directory after running
configure and
make and then
symlinked as libreadline.so.5.
As always with contributed binary software, it is possible that the
required dependencies may change when the installer is updated.
Python-2.7.11 is used by many scripts.
Ruby-2.3.0 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.
User Notes: http://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]](../images/note.png)
Note
The distribution binaries installed below 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.
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 4.2 gigabytes of disk space.
The time to complete the download will depend on your internet
connection speed and the number of packages selected.