[Tex/LaTex] I have two versions of Texlive on Ubuntu and I don’t know how to indicate that one should be used

installingtexliveUbuntu

I recently ran into a problem when compiling a doc, where latex indicated a missing package, while Ubuntu indicated that it was installed. The missing package in question is pst-node.sty but I think that's irrelevant.

All the packages in the compilation came from /usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/tex/latex/. Indeed, when I do 

echo $PATH

the only tex-relevant path I get is

/usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/x86_64-linux

But kpsewhich pst-node.sty returns nothing. However:

$ locate pst-node.sty
/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/pst-node/pst-node.sty

And using Synaptic, I can indeed see that pst-node is installed, through the texlive-pstricks package.

My question: how can I have only one LaTeX distribution on my computer? I'm happy keeping the one managed by Ubuntu (for simplicity), as I do not need very fine-grained Latex package management.

Best Answer

I could not install packages using tlmgr (I guess because, as jon pointed out, TL2013 is not maintained anymore).

So I ended up using tlmgr uninstall to remove the TexLive "vanilla" installation, remove its path from $PATH, and reinstall the Ubuntu version from scratch. It is good enough for me for the meantime, although it's true that I ended up installing giant Debian/ubuntu packages just to have access to a few LaTeX packages.

I will probably look more into reinstalling Vanilla properly, without Ubuntu getting confused, thanks to the links provided here.

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