[Tex/LaTex] Installing biber on Ubuntu 10.04

biberinstallingtexliveUbuntu

My tex file has backend=biber in the header. But, as I use tex-live 2009, biber is not installed by default. I downloaded the biber.tar.gz from the biber project page at sourceforg., When I extracted it, it had only one file named biber. I placed it in /usr/bin dir and made it executable. And I ran biber my_paper.aux and it showed an error: /usr/bin not found.

I cloned the git dev project of biber. And when I tried building it, it showed up lots of dependancy issues.

So is there an easy way to get biber working on my 32bit ubuntu 11.04 system?

Best Answer

I've installed biber on both 32- and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu in essentially the same way you described with no problems, although I put the extracted biber in /usr/local/bin. The error you describe sounds strange, though. What happens if you run (say):

/usr/bin/cal

..?

If that works as expected, then I'd delete older versions of biber, extract a new copy, make it executable, and try this sequence:

  • first: make sure backend=biber is an option you're giving to biblatex;
  • run your file (my_paper.tex) through (say) latex (this should create a file with a .bcf extension);
  • then run biber my_paper or biber my_paper.bcf (not biber my_paper.aux).

If you're having trouble with these steps, then can you even run biber -v to check your version. (I get biber version: 0.9.6 (beta) when I run the command.)

Another thing to check is that your biblatex and its related packages (etoolbox, logreq, and, ideally, csquotes) are also up to date --- although I can't see how this could relate to the more profound error you seem to be experiencing.

EDIT: you may want to look at the biber documentation as well: http://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/development/documentation/

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