Following the instructions in this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LaTeX , I installed TexLive, which needs some 1GB of space (I installed the texlive-full package). Yet, after installation, I don't seem to find any command that seems to represent the TexLive!! Is it the normal tex, latex, pdflatex, etc.? Well, I already had those before installing TexLive? So where was the 1GB installed? What about the packages? Where were they installed?
[Tex/LaTex] How to call TexLive in Ubuntu
texliveUbuntu
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As both Debian maintainer of TeX Live and author of tlmgr, I would like to state my personal ideas about it:
First, with the Debian native packages of TeX Live there will be in foreseeable time no tlmgr available. Even if it will be available, then only for managing TEXMFHOME or TEXMFLOCAL (for the sysadmin) (by using the user mode patches for tlmgr which are badly outdated at the moment).
On the other hand, it might not be necessary to have tlmgr available. Package installation, removal and configuration is done by the APT family (apt-get, aptitude and respective GUIs). Package search can be done with apt-cache search. That leads to the following suggestions:
For normal users, that are users who are not developers of (La)TeX/Font/etc packages, nor play with the latest font developments (esp. otf math fonts), for these users it is better on Debian/Ubuntu to stay with the native packages instead of installing your own copy. Especially if one does not know exactly about basic sysadmin tasks (PATH search priority, permissions etc), since if you don't know it is bound to create problems.
If you are developer, or have experience enough with both basic sysadmin tasks, using TeX Live upstream together with either a proper equivs package for texlive, or (disk space allowing) double installation.
Furthermore, if you are using Debian testing or sid (and if it exists something similar in Ubuntu), then after release of wheezy I plan to do monthly updates of the texlive packages based on the current tlnet status. Thus even Debian people would come - with a short delay - to latest packages.
There are several issues here:
you have put the symlink into
/usr/bin
, which is not a good idea, as this is a directory that is managed by dpkg/apt. You should have installed them into/usr/local/bin
(etc) as suggested by the installerafter that, you installed texstudio and by this the dependencies on texlive packages in Ubuntu. Since the Debian/Ubuntu packages also contain the same files in
/usr/bin
, all the smylinks are hosed. In particular, the link targets are overwritten with the version of binaries in the Debian/Ubuntu packages.
What you should do is:
remove textudio, Debian/Ubuntu texlive packages, and your local TeX Live installation in
/usr/local/texlive
install again from the iso image, or better directly from the network installer, generating links into
/usr/local
use the equivs feature (see above comments) for building a texlive-local package, install that
finally you can install all kind of programs from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories without having your installation hosed, and other texlive package installed.
Best Answer
You could use
kpathsea
to check the locations.Type this at the command prompt to get the main path of your TeX installation:
kpsewhich
can provide more information, just typekpsewhich --help
to learn more about it.Further you could use the
which
tool to locate executables:You may also check the versions of TeX, pdfTeX, LaTeX etc.:
All can be done at the command prompt, i.e. within a terminal window.
Further there are of course package managing tools of your distribution for look-up which packages are installed - Synaptic,
dpkg-query -l
etc.If you're still not sure: just go ahead, compile a LaTeX file. Afterwards read the first line of the
.log
file produced by LaTeX, within the same directory. The first line may look like:So you know if you're using a current version. The package manager which you used for installation should have taken care of all, so texlive would be used. The questions 'What' and 'Where' can be answered by the mentioned
kpsewhich
, using various parameters, which does path look-up and file-look-up and presents the actually 'active' file.