[Tex/LaTex] dpkg error when installing TeX Live in Ubuntu

texliveUbuntu

My Acer Chromebook C720 is running Ubuntu 14.04.
(I installed Ubuntu/ChrUbuntu using the script found at
link.)

I wanted to install "vanilla" TeX Live
rather than the version in the Ubuntu software repository.
And so I followed the instructions found in
this answer
to the question How to install "vanilla" TeXLive on Debian or Ubuntu?

Unfortunately, I ran into the following error
when installing the "fake" package
to make Ubuntu think it has installed TeX Live:

$ sudo dpkg -i texlive-local_2014-1_all.deb
dpkg: regarding texlive-local_2014-1_all.deb containing texlive-local:
 texlive-base conflicts with texlive-common
  texlive-local provides texlive-common and is to be installed.

dpkg: error processing archive texlive-local_2014-1_all.deb (--install):
 conflicting packages - not installing texlive-local
Errors were encountered while processing:
 texlive-local_2014-1_all.deb

How should I proceed?

Best Answer

User cfr pointed out that I may already have texlive-base installed. To check whether this was indeed the case, I listed the installed packages with the name "texlive*".

$ dpkg -l | grep texlive
ii  texlive-base                  2013.20140215-1                                     all          TeX Live: Essential programs and files
ii  texlive-binaries              2013.20130729.30972-2build3                         amd64        Binaries for TeX Live
ii  texlive-fonts-recommended     2013.20140215-1                                     all          TeX Live: Recommended fonts
ii  texlive-generic-recommended   2013.20140215-1                                     all          TeX Live: Generic recommended packages
ii  texlive-latex-base            2013.20140215-1                                     all          TeX Live: LaTeX fundamental packages
ii  texlive-latex-recommended     2013.20140215-1                                     all          TeX Live: LaTeX recommended packages

I then uninstalled all the "texlive*" packages

sudo apt-get purge texlive*

The installation now works as expected.

$ sudo dpkg -i texlive-local_2014-1_all.deb
Selecting previously unselected package texlive-local.
(Reading database ... 166027 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack texlive-local_2014-1_all.deb ...
Unpacking texlive-local (2014-1) ...
Setting up texlive-local (2014-1) ...

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] TeX Live with Kile in Ubuntu

It's quite strange that uname -i gives "unknown". However, the TeX Live installer should have guessed your architecture. So, look at the output of

ls /usr/local/texlive/2011/bin

and use that; since you're on a 64 bit machine, it should be

x86_64-linux

so the first line to be saved in zzzz-texlive.sh should be

export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH

A logout-login cycle should be sufficient to make the new setting work.

[Tex/LaTex] TeX Live Manager Update setup on Linux

If you have both a GNU/Linux distribution provided TeX Live and a manually installed one, you'll have two different tlmgr.

The one in /usr/bin will not update packages, but just change configuration parameters.

The one in /usr/local/texlive/<YEAR>/bin/<ARCH>, instead, will do updates to the manually installed TeX Live. Here <YEAR> stands for the version you have, probably 2014, while <ARCH> is the standard symbolic name for the processor, say x86_64-linux or i386-linux.

The correct call, if your data is as above, is

sudo /usr/local/texlive/2014/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr --gui

When doing a manual installation of TeX Live, I recommend doing

sudo ln -s /usr/local/texlive/2014/bin/x86_64-linux /opt/texbin

so you just need to add to your PATH the simpler /opt/texbin and have another benefit: when TeX Live 2015 is released and you install it, you just have to do

sudo rm /opt/texbin
sudo ln -s /usr/local/texlive/2015/bin/x86_64-linux /opt/texbin

and do no other change to your setup, because your PATH variable will already point to the correct location. If you create this symbolic link, then

sudo /opt/texbin/tlmgr --gui

will become the correct call.

See this article on TUGboat which explains the installation procedure I recommend and that's still valid provided you just change the year from 2010 to the current release year.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] TeX Live with Kile in Ubuntu

[Tex/LaTex] TeX Live Manager Update setup on Linux

Related Question