Install vanilla LaTeX on Ubuntu 14.04
Jun 2, 2014
warning
This post is more than 5 years old. While math doesn't age, code and operating systems do. Please use the code/ideas with caution and expect some issues due to the age of the content. I am keeping these posts up for archival purposes because I still find them useful for reference, even when they are out of date!
Note: There is now a PPA to install TeX Live 2016 for both Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04-- checkout the new post: Install TeX Live 2016 on Ubuntu 16.04 .
In this post I will go through a vanilla installation of Tex Live--
you may not want to do this. I'm choosing this installation
method because of the ability to stay current with LaTeX updates and greater
flexibility. However, for most people I would suggest installing the LaTeX
setup in Ubuntu 14.04 repositories-- search for
texlive-full
.
I will do the vanilla installation following the very thorough guide provided here: vanilla LaTeX at stackexchange . The guide is for Ubuntu 12.10 but I'll be doing this on Ubuntu 14.04. This will install TeX Live 2013, which is scheduled to be replaced by TeX Live 2014 in July 2014. However, TeX Live 2013 is the current implementation at this point.
First, get the installer:
$ wget http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf install-tl-unx.tar.gz
This will create the directory
install-tl-***
where
***
will be numbers (looks like a date to
me) that depends on when you try this installation. Next, change into the
directory and start the installer. For me, this was:
$ cd install-tl-20140417
$ sudo ./install-tl
This will start the installer and you can specify the options you like. I took
this opportunity to set the default paper size to letter instead of A4.
Once satisfied, press I
to start the
install-- this will
take quite a while (hours) due to the large size of the distribution.
Path for LaTeX
If you type:
$ pdflatex --version
at this point Ubuntu will still not know where to find the installation and suggest that you install something from the repository. To fix this, we create a link:
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/* /opt/texbin
Then, we add the path to our environment file (I'll use vim, but you can use nano, emacs, etc.):
$ sudo vim /etc/environment
Before the edit, I had the following in environment:
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games"
which I change, to add our path:
PATH="/opt/texbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games"
Now, to get these changes working you have to logout. When you login again, try the following to make sure that the changes worked:
$ which tex
/opt/texbin/tex
Telling Ubuntu that LaTeX is installed
Now, because we didn't use apt-get
to
install Tex Live, Ubuntu needs to be told that it's installed. This can be
accomplished with the equivs
package in
the Ubuntu repository:
$ sudo apt-get install equivs --no-install-recommends
$ mkdir /tmp/tl-equivs
$ cd /tmp/tl-equivs
$ equivs-control texlive-local
This will create the texlive-local
file.
An example of what the contents of this fill should look like is here:
debian-equivs-2013-ex.txt
.
I copied the contents into my
texlive-local
and changed the
maintainer information to my details. Finally, we create this fake Debian
package and install:
$ equivs-build texlive-local
$ sudo dpkg -i texlive-local_2013-1_all.deb
Updating LaTeX
The Tex Live manager, tlmgr
, can be used
from the terminal as described in this post:
vanilla LaTeX at stackexchange
.
However, the full path will have to be used. For example:
Update all packages that can be updated:
$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr update --all
List packages that can be updated:
$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr update --list
If you try either of the above commands at this date (June 2014) you will be told that TeX is frozen and no updates are allowed. This is done each year as the new TeX Live release is assembled and tested.
Finally, this install can moved to use TeX Live 2014 when it is released. See the notes here: vanilla LaTeX at stackexchange .