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I have just received the TeX Collection 2019 DVD and tried to use it to install texlive on a 32bit linux PC. The installer said something along the lines that no binary was available for my system and gave a list of 5 choices. I selected 64bit linux in the hope that it might work. It installed but the binaries couldn't run. The documentation showed a list of some 16 binaries, so the DVD and the documentation do not match.

How can I do a texlive 2019 install for a 32 bit linux OS?

Peter Wilson
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  • Hi Peter, exactly how did you try to install it, and what did it show? I haven't installed texlive from dvd in years, but we can probably fiuøgure this out. Also where did you see a list of 16 binaries? There might be things left out on the dvd because of lack of space. – daleif Jun 19 '19 at 17:37
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    https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc.html#platforms says an i386-linux binary distribution is included in texlive 2019 but omitted from DVD – David Carlisle Jun 19 '19 at 17:39
  • If you have the harddisk space for it, I'd recommend rsyncing the tlnet archive to disk. And the install from there. This is especially good if your Internet is slow, you can just run it over night. – daleif Jun 19 '19 at 17:54
  • @daleif I installed following the instructions on the DVD in file texlive/texlive-doc/texlive-en.pdf. This document included the list of 16 binaries. – Peter Wilson Jun 20 '19 at 15:44
  • As David mentions, that doc is probably for the entire texlive, not the reduction that fits the dvd. Btw: exactly which Linux os are you using. I haven't seen 32bit systems for a number of years. – daleif Jun 20 '19 at 17:02
  • @DavidCarlisle Would you be prepared to turn your comment into an answer? I followed the instructions on the website you gave and the installation worked. It took thrice as long as from the DVD but it was successful. Also I didn't have to update packages as I would have had to to from a DVD installation. – Peter Wilson Jun 20 '19 at 17:59
  • @daleif I'm using Ubuntu 12.xx which satisfies my limited needs. I do not want to install a new OS because of the possibilty of losing everything. I have a dual-boot PC but the Windows side has gone kaput (no matter, I only use that for my scanner). – Peter Wilson Jun 20 '19 at 18:04
  • How is your Internet connection? Slow or reasonable? If reasonable, just get the online installer. And use that to install. If slow, rsyncing the texlive tlnet repo might be better (as mentioned above). – daleif Jun 20 '19 at 18:06
  • Uhh, come to think of it, tlmgr is system independent. Install the 64 bit version. Then once the new path have been adjusted, you should be able to install an extra architecture using tlmgr from an online repo, once 32 is working, you can use tlmgr to delete the 64bit binaries – daleif Jun 20 '19 at 19:32

2 Answers2

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http://tug.org/texlive/doc.html#platforms says an i386-linux binary distribution is included in texlive 2019 but omitted from DVD, so you will need to do a network install of at least the binary part.

David Carlisle
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Just in addition to Davids answer. You can install TeXLive 2019 from the DVD, but it does not include the 32bit linux binaries. So choose the 64bit binaries.

Along with the installation we get the texlive manager tlmgr. It is written in Perl and thus works on all systems with a Perl interpreter. Here we need in directly on the terminal as the gui interface does not support everything

First make sure that tlmgr is using the online repositories and not the DVD.

You can set CTAN as the default (it will pic a CTAN mirror) via

tlmgr option repository ctan

Use the following to list the available platforms from the repository

tlmgr platform list

Then 

 tlmgr platform add i386-linux

To add 32bit linux. Perhaps also

 tlmgr platform set i386-linux

To explicitly tell it to use this. The default might be an auto detection.

Once everything is done, you can remove the 64bit linux binaries via

tlmgr platform remove x86_64-linux

Seems to work quite well.

daleif
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