Texlive Full installation on Solus Linux

Question

The official Solus repository provides only texlive-base (current version: 20160523b-6) for installation. How can one install texlive-full (current version: 2016) on Solus Linux?

Answer 1

texlive-full installation

The following provides a step-by-step guide for installing texlive-full on Solus Linux. Plase see this texlive-full quick install for detailed instructions.

There are a number of ways to install texlive-full like network install, iso install, etc. A more detailed description can be found in above link. Assuming network install, the first step is to download the installer and run the install-tl script.

After the installation is done, the next step is setup the PATH variable. Add the following two lines to your bashrc file located in your home directory. Full path of the bashrc file is: /home/username/.bashrc.

PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH

export PATH

Note

1. Please do not set the PATH variable as PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux. The reason for this will be explained later.
2. Choose the syntax appropriate for your shell, your installation directory, and your platform for setting up the PATH variable. For example if you have a 32-bit platform use PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/i386-linux:$PATH

Next, logout and then after login check if the the PATH variable is properly set or not, run this command: echo $PATH. This should output something similar to:

/usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

This is it, check if latex is properly installed by running the command latex. This should output something like:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.17 (TeX Live 2016) (preloaded format=latex) restricted \write18 enabled. **

Setting up TeXstudio in Solus linux

The above was the easy part. Most of us work with an integrated editor such as TeXstudio when working with latex. The following guide shows how to setup an editor such as TeXstudio to work with texlive-full in Solus linux. Although the following is written for TeXstudio in mind, it should work with other editors also with appropriate changes.

Install TeXstudio from the software center. The problem is that this will also install the texlive-base package present in the Solus repository. The reason is that TeXstudio depends upon the texlive-base package and the Solus software center does not recognize the texlive-full installation that is already installed on the system (if you followed the guide till now, that is). I couldn't find a workaround this. No worries though, proceed with the installation of both TeXstudio and texlive-base package.

After the install is done, you would have two different versions of texlive installed on the system.

1. texlive-full which was installed manually.
2. texlive-base which was installed along with TeXstudio.

Now, if you compile a latex document via the terminal it will compile via the texlive-full package. (Hence the reason for setting up the PATH variable as PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH). But if you compile your document using TeXstudio, then it will compile via the texlive-base package.

Hence, the next step is to manually configure TeXstudio to use the texlive-full package.

1. Open TeXstudio and go to Options -> Configure TeXstudio -> Commands
2. There you will see the different programs available in the texlive package.
3. Click on the Select Program icon on the right side of the pane, and browse to the texlive-full installation directory. in my case, this is : /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux/. Find and select the appropriate program for each of: latex, pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex and you are done

That's it !!!

Answer 2

The full installation of TeX Live is available in Solus. It contains the full content of the 1.9GB texlive-20160523b-texmf.tar.xz (minus docs)

Installing these packages would result in the full TeX Live install.

eopkg list-available | grep texlive

I am in the process of creating a TeX Live meta package so that you can install the complete TeX Live more conveniently by installing the texlive-all package. This will be available sometime in the next few days.

Answer 3

You can simply install TexStudio without installing TeX Live from the Solus repositories.

Once you've installed TeX Live (the install script from the TeX Live homepage works fine), install the dependencies of TexStudio except TexLive using eopkg:

sudo eopkg it zlib poppler-qt5 qt5-base qt5-script libx11 libstdc++ zlib poppler-qt5 qt5-base qt5-script libx11 libstdc++

Then install TexStudio without dependencies:

sudo eopkg it --ignore-dependency texstudio

Since you've already manually installed the needed dependencies, the only thing that won't be installed is texlive-base.

You'll still have to fix the PATH as mentioned by Orion, and you still have to manually set the various command properties in the TexStudio settings, but you won't have two competing TeX Live installations on your system.

Answer 4

This is just a comment, a bit too long.

Have I understood you right:

1. You manually installed upstream texlive? Where was it installed? If my memory is correct it installs in /usr/local/texlive/2016 by default.
2. Did you ask it to make soft lines in common places? (not recommended)
3. You installed texstudio which in addition also installed texlive-base presumably from Debian (not because texstudio needs it, but because it us listed as recommended)

Is this correct?

Thus you now have two latex installations. And we need to use the right one.

As mentioned I'm not familiar with solus Linux, and for some reason it does not like my version of virtualbox, so I cannot test it.

Under Ubuntu it is enough to add the path change to dot-profile (adding it also to dot-bashrc does not hurt, but it alone is often not enough). But this being a different Linux, we do not know if dot-profile or dot-bashrc is even being used.