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only for managing TEXMFHOME or TEXMFLOCAL (for the sysadmin) (by using the user mode patches for tlmgr which are badly outdated at the moment).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.
i do the same thing as you (12.04
, tl 2012
). i created a partition /local/texlive/2012
and installed tex live into that.
when i need to use tl
(when i'm working for myself, rather than as a sys-admin
for people who are using unadorned ubuntu tex), i add
/local/texlive/2012/bin/x86_64-linux
at the front of my path. my bash command is
export PATH=/local/texlive/2012/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH
which means that tl2012
will be searched before any ubuntu-installed stuff.
texlive is configured so that it will see the texmf
trees, by default, from its knowledge of where it was installed.
the arrangement should work for you, if you can arrange your tree(s) to look similar.
(i've been using this arrangement since 2009 (i.e., since i was diddling with tl2009.)
Best Answer
See: How do I make my Perl scripts act like normal programs on Windows?.
And I recommend installing a full Perl interpreter: Perl Binaries/Windows, because the Perl of TeX Live does not include all needed modules for the scripts provided by the distribution. For example,
File::Which
is not included that is needed bypurifyeps
: