[Tex/LaTex] What LaTeX system should I use for an Ubuntu/Win7 dual boot environment

editorsinstalling

I have a fresh install of a dual boot system with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10. They live in separate partitions of the hard drive, invisible (unmounted…) to eachother, but have a common data partition which they can both reach.

Now, I want to be able to use LaTeX regardless of which OS I've booted. I've previoulsy used MiKTeX and TeXWorks on Windows, and been pretty satisfied with it, but I'm new to LaTeX on Ubuntu, so I have no prejudice on editors etc for this half. What I liked most about TeXWorks was the ability to compile the document without leaving the program, and the split view (source code on one half of the screen, output from latest compile run on the other), so if that's available in an Ubuntu IDE that's a plus.

The most important thing is that they share a package repository. In MiKTeX, packages I hadn't used before were automatically downloaded from CTAN when used the first time, which made things a lot simpler. I also had my own little collection of packages, in a separate root folder. Any setup that doesn't share all packages between the two operative systems, makes my life harder than it has to be =)

How do I best set up this? On which OS should I install what, and how? Does the installation order matter?

Any tips are welcome!

Best Answer

I would recommend you to install the full TeXLive manually (i.e. not using the Ubuntu packages) with both Linux and Windows binaries to the shared drive. The full TeXLive is about 2.6GB in size and should contain every package which is also available in MikTeX, except brand-new packages not yet included. Installing everything avoids any issues with missing packages. TeXWorks is available for both Windows and Linux.

The manual installation is important to get recent versions of the LaTeX package and to be able to run tlmgr to update the packages. The 2.9GB should be ok for modern harddrives. If you deselect foreign languages and special fonts as well as e.g. XeTeX if not required you will be able to save a GB or so. The Ubuntu packages are largely outdated (still using TeXLive 2009 for example) and should not be used. One pain here is that Ubuntu will install its own TeXLive if you try to install anything TeX specific. One way to avoid this is to install TeXLive first using Ubuntu and then again manually. Both should use different paths and you should be able to delete the texmf tree of the Ubuntu version without any problem afterwards.

apt-get

If you installed TeX through Ubuntu's package manager, everything will be handled through it too. Look for packages called texlive-..., i.e., to install pstricks, use the command

apt-get install texlive-pstricks

This way of installing teX on Ubuntu is common as it easy, but the drawback is that packages can be (significantly) outdated, as updates are infrequent.

tlmgr

Installing TeXLive directly (called a "vanilla" installation) is a little more hassle, but you get the benefits of an up-to-date installation.
There is already a howto on TeX.sx on how to perform such an installation: How to install "vanilla" TeXLive on Debian or Ubuntu?
As for how to manage packages, you will then be using a tool called tlmgr. The full documentation is available online, and the short answer is that you install packages with

tlmgr install <package name>

and update the whole system with

tlmgr update -all

[Tex/LaTex] Installing TeX Live 2013 on Linux

In your home directory, look in the (hidden) files .bashrc and .bash_profile for lines that include your texlive 2012 path and remove the path. Then add these lines to your .bashrc:

export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH
export MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH
export INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH

(If you installed texlive somewhere else, or aren't using x86_64, change the paths to point to the correct install directory)

EDIT: I seem to have misunderstood the original question. The above will make sure you're pointing to the correct version of TeXLive (sounds like you might have some 2012 packages installed via your package manager as well). If you want to use a TL installation from a DVD, but packages from your package manager (I don't recommend it, but that sounds like it's what you want to do), you can try creating a dummy TL package so that your package manager will think TL Is installed from it and the dependency chain can be resolved.

Something like the following (from the Tug package on Debian) should do the trick:

Install vanilla TeX Live as root, system-wide.
Ensure that the only Debian TeX Live packages installed are tex-common, texinfo, and perhaps lmodern
Add TeX Live's bin directory to ENV_PATH in /etc/login.defs. [basically what I said above, except that I assume that you might want a different version of TeXLive for different people, hence the use of bashrc).
Tell APT about your TeX Live installation by building a dummy package using equivs:
- $ aptitude install equivs # as root
- mkdir /tmp/tl-equivs && cd /tmp/tl-equivs
- equivs-control texlive-local
- edit texlive-local (see below)
- $ equivs-build texlive-local
- $ sudo dpkg -i texlive-local_2011-1_all.deb

At the step "edit texlive-local", edit the Maintainer field and the list of the packages provided by your local TeX Live installation as appropriate. If you installed scheme-full except collection-texinfo as recommended, the file should look like this example.

For more information, see this question.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Installing TeX Live 2013 on Linux

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