9

I am looking to update my version of beamer to 3.10 (which supports nonstandard slide aspect ratios), however the Ubuntu main repository only has version 3.07. I was not able to locate tlmgr. Is there some other repository that I can include in synaptic to get the latest versions of packages or some other way to manage packages short of manually replacing files?

Further information:

TeXLive 2009-10 on Ubuntu 10.10

Richard Terrett
  • 3,381

3 Answers3

9

Ubuntu (and many other Linux distributions) repackages TeX Live without tlmgr, the idea being that the Linux package manager is then in charge of what gets installed. Unfortunately, they also ship a rather old TeX Live (currently TeX Live 2009 when the release version is TeX Live 2010). So there is no way to install updated packages using the system as set up by Ubuntu. You'll need to either (1) do a local installation of beamer or (2) install TeX Live 2010 outside of the Ubuntu package manager.

Community
  • 1
Joseph Wright
  • 259,911
  • 34
  • 706
  • 1,036
  • 1
    I'd forgotten that question! I was just effectively typing out my answer to that question again when your answer appeared. Just to add that installing TeX Live 2010 outside of the Ubuntu package manager works absolutely fine (Option 3 in my answer to your linked question) and is very easy to do. – Andrew Stacey Mar 17 '11 at 08:42
  • @Andrew: I guess somewhere on {TeX} there's a good link for the first method (local installation), but I couldn't find an ideal one. Do you know of one? – Joseph Wright Mar 17 '11 at 08:47
  • @Joseph: I don't know of one, do we want one? I presume that this is well-covered by the TUG/TeX FAQ sites. I suppose that there's no harm in duplication. – Andrew Stacey Mar 17 '11 at 08:50
  • @Joseph Wright: I suspected it would come down to this. Oh well, I think Andrew Stacey's option 3 will be best in the long term. Thanks for your time. starts download – Richard Terrett Mar 17 '11 at 09:15
  • Note that I created a bug report on the outdated TeXLive in Ubuntu. It would be great if you could mark it as affecting you and subscribe to it, maybe also leave a comment. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/texlive-base/+bug/712521 – Ingo Apr 09 '11 at 12:39
  • @Ingo Gerth: This no longer affects me as I am currently using non-repository TeXLive, which I consider to be the optimal solution. Whilst I am certainly not averse to TL2010 being in the repository, the real problem is not the absence of TL2010 but the inertia of the repository, of which the absence of TL2010 is a symptom. Even then, the TL metapackage in the repository is rather monolithic and frozen in time whereas tlmgr allows finer subpackage control and faster updates. This said, I will add my voice to the bug report when I get time as it's still a good idea. Thanks. :) – Richard Terrett Apr 12 '11 at 04:49
2

If you are just interested in a newer version of beamer, you can also install beamer in your home directory (I believe the default path under Ubuntu is ~/texmf). See Section 2.3 of the beamer user manual on how to do that.

Michael Ummels
  • 8,604
  • 3
  • 36
  • 27
1

Debian has latex-beamer for 2.10 in unstable. You could rebuild it on your machine, or possibly just install the binary directly. (See Debian latex-beamer package page for more information. Click on the unstable version on the left for downloads.) It doesn't have much by way of dependencies. It is also possible that some more recent version of Ubuntu has 2.10. You didn't specify which version of Ubuntu you are using.

Also, building or updating Debian/Ubuntu packages is not really that hard, if you are willng to do a little work.

# apt-cache policy latex-beamer
latex-beamer:
  Installed: 3.07-2
  Candidate: 3.07-2
  Version table:
     3.10-1 0
         50 http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ unstable/main i386 Packages
 *** 3.07-2 0
        500 http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ squeeze/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Package: latex-beamer
[...]
Version: 3.10-1
Depends: pgf (>= 1.00-1), latex-xcolor (>= 2.00-1), texlive-latex-base
Faheem Mitha
  • 7,778