Upstream prefers to install in /usr/local
but the BLFS editors regard that as
inconvenient, and think using /opt/texlive
is more appropriate. Originally BLFS
used a full binary install to bootstrap the source install, so the
same prefix is used for both.
Before starting to build TeX Live, set up your PATH so that the
system can properly find the files. If you set up your login scripts
as recommended in The Bash Shell Startup
Files, update the needed paths by creating the texlive.sh
script. The programs are always
installed in an <ARCH>-linux subdirectory and on 32-bit x86
this is always i386-linux. For x86_64 and i?86 we can generate this
as $TEXARCH:
If upgrading from a previous year's version, you should manually
edit texlive.sh
to ensure that the
version for the year you wish to use is the only TeX present (some
people need to keep multiple years available to ensure there are no
regressions in their documents).
Now, create the texlive.sh script as the root
user:
TEXARCH=$(uname -m | sed -e 's/i.86/i386/' -e 's/$/-linux/')
cat > /etc/profile.d/texlive.sh << EOF
# Begin texlive setup
TEXLIVE_PREFIX=/opt/texlive/2024
export TEXLIVE_PREFIX
pathappend \$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/doc/info INFOPATH
pathappend \$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/bin/$TEXARCH
TEXMFCNF=\$TEXLIVE_PREFIX/texmf-dist/web2c
export TEXMFCNF
# End texlive setup
EOF
unset TEXARCH
The backslashes before the dollar signs in the script above are to facilitate a copy/paste operation. The backslashes should not appear in the actual script.
The new paths can be immediately activated by running:
source /etc/profile
You should now proceed either to install-tl-unx for a binary installation of texlive, or to texlive-20240312 to begin installing from source.