The most Tex friendly distribution?

The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Armando Martins]

Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?
Thomas Schmitz told me OpenSuse (which I 've been using for a year...) is  
not that Tex-friendly...
Thanks
Armando
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Martin Schröder]

2008/9/15 Armando Martins <cidadaum@sapo.pt>:
> Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?

Debian. The maintainer (Norbert Preining) actually visits TeX
conferences and was in Bohinj. :-)

> Thomas Schmitz told me OpenSuse (which I 've been using for a year...) is
> not that Tex-friendly...

IMHO it's not so good as debian, but much better then Red Hat/Fedora
or the rest.

Best
   Martin
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Matija Šuklje]

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Dne ponedeljek 15. septembra 2008 je Martin Schröder napisal(a):
> 2008/9/15 Armando Martins <cidadaum@sapo.pt>:
> > Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?
>
> Debian. The maintainer (Norbert Preining) actually visits TeX
> conferences and was in Bohinj. :-)

I use Gentoo and am pretty happy with the modular TeX Live ebuilds, but on top 
of my head, I'd also say Debian would probably be (alongside Slackware and 
Gentoo) one of the distros with the biggest TeX userbase.


Cheers,
Matija

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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Thomas A. Schmitz]

On Sep 15, 2008, at 7:31 PM, Matija Šuklje wrote:

> Dne ponedeljek 15. septembra 2008 je Martin Schröder napisal(a):
>> 2008/9/15 Armando Martins <cidadaum@sapo.pt>:
>>> Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?
>>
>> Debian. The maintainer (Norbert Preining) actually visits TeX
>> conferences and was in Bohinj. :-)
>
> I use Gentoo and am pretty happy with the modular TeX Live ebuilds,  
> but on top
> of my head, I'd also say Debian would probably be (alongside  
> Slackware and
> Gentoo) one of the distros with the biggest TeX userbase.
>

If bandwith is an issue (i.e. if you're on a slow connection), modular  
builds are important. If you have a need for religious service and are  
convinced locusts and floods will ensue if you install something  
without using the official (TM) authentic (TM) package manager of your  
distribution, by all means, choose your distribution very carefully.  
But if these points aren't important to you, please just use the  
TeXLive installer on ANY linux distribution and install. TeXLive now  
has a wonderful tlmgr program which will help you keep up to date;  
this will probably be much faster than any packaging system (with the  
possible exception of Debian, unless Norbert is stuck in the mountains  
without internet access...) SuSE 10.X used to have a habit of setting  
certain environment variables (such as $TEXINPUTS) without bothering  
to tell the user about it; I think this is no longer the case in 11.0.  
I really didn't mean to say that the problems you reported a while ago  
were connected to your linux distribution. The most important piece of  
advice I can give: please please please install just one TeX system  
and STICK WITH IT. Either TeXLive or the TeX system offered by your  
distribution or the ConTeXt minimals - but not all of them; that would  
be fine for an advanced user but needlessly confusing for a beginner.

Thomas
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Gour]

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>>>>> "Armando" == Armando Martins <cidadaum@sapo.pt> writes:

Armando> Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution,
Armando> please?  

I'm quite happy with Archlinux (texlive 2008 entered 'extra' repository
few days ago).


Sincerely,
Gour

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Gour  | Zagreb, Croatia  | GPG key: C6E7162D
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Peter Münster]

On Mon, Sep 15 2008, Armando Martins wrote:
> 
> Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?
> Thomas Schmitz told me OpenSuse (which I 've been using for a year...) is  
> not that Tex-friendly...

Hello,
What's the issue with suse? I'm using it since 1995 without problems.
Now I'm just adding the minimals to /opt/context to have up to date luatex
and context versions. When I need latex, I use the suse texlive
distribution.
Cheers, Peter

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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Thomas A. Schmitz]

On Sep 17, 2008, at 11:05 PM, Peter Münster wrote:

> Hello,
> What's the issue with suse? I'm using it since 1995 without problems.
> Now I'm just adding the minimals to /opt/context to have up to date  
> luatex
> and context versions. When I need latex, I use the suse texlive
> distribution.
> Cheers, Peter

http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20080320.203129.aec3fb49.en.html

:-)

Thomas
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20080320.203129.aec3fb49.en.html

  Argh :-)

  Setting TEXINPUTS is not at all friendly, that's for sure.

	Arthur
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Peter Münster]

On Wed, Sep 17 2008, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
> 
> http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20080320.203129.aec3fb49.en.html

You're right, but I've to protect suse a bit: this was only an issue with a
very new MKIV (new logic how to use TEXINPUTS), and suse could really not
know about that. TEXINPUTS was quite useful, because every user could put
his own personal directory in it, and there did not need to be an ls-R
file.

Cheers, Peter

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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Thomas A. Schmitz]

On Sep 18, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Peter Münster wrote:

> You're right, but I've to protect suse a bit: this was only an issue  
> with a
> very new MKIV (new logic how to use TEXINPUTS), and suse could  
> really not
> know about that. TEXINPUTS was quite useful, because every user  
> could put
> his own personal directory in it, and there did not need to be an ls-R
> file.
>
> Cheers, Peter

Well, no offense, I used to be a big fan of SuSE myself (still like it  
a lot, but their package manager really needs work). But: I just  
double-checked, and TEXINPUTS is still set on my 11.0 system - even  
though I don't have any SuSE-provided TeX-system installed. That's  
really unpardonable. I can understand why they want to set it for  
their own TeXLive packages, but not on a virgin system without any TeX  
component. For an inexperienced user who wants to install TeXLive from  
DVD or via the net installer, this will be a major obstacle. So I  
think the point remains valid: SuSE is not a TeX-friendly distribution.

Thomas
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[George N. White III]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Thomas A. Schmitz
<thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> On Sep 18, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Peter Münster wrote:
>
>> You're right, but I've to protect suse a bit: this was only an issue
>> with a
>> very new MKIV (new logic how to use TEXINPUTS), and suse could
>> really not
>> know about that. TEXINPUTS was quite useful, because every user
>> could put
>> his own personal directory in it, and there did not need to be an ls-R
>> file.

TeX Live 2008 has TEXMFHOME set to $HOME/texmf in the default
configuration file (configured so ls-R is not needed).

> Well, no offense, I used to be a big fan of SuSE myself (still like it
> a lot, but their package manager really needs work). But: I just
> double-checked, and TEXINPUTS is still set on my 11.0 system - even
> though I don't have any SuSE-provided TeX-system installed. That's
> really unpardonable. I can understand why they want to set it for
> their own TeXLive packages, but not on a virgin system without any TeX
> component. For an inexperienced user who wants to install TeXLive from
> DVD or via the net installer, this will be a major obstacle. So I
> think the point remains valid: SuSE is not a TeX-friendly distribution.

Having TEXINPUTS set when TeX is not installed is not nice, but it is
really a trivial issue.  Someone who uses SuSE should post a note
explaining how to remove TEXINPUTS (hopefully in a way that will
survive updates) and file a bug report with SuSE.   Distributions are
can only be as "TeX friendly" as their users -- otherwise you get
what is needed to build program documents and no more.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Peter Münster]

On Wed, Sep 17 2008, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
> 
> > What's the issue with suse? I'm using it since 1995 without problems.
> > Now I'm just adding the minimals to /opt/context to have up to date  
> > luatex
> > and context versions. When I need latex, I use the suse texlive
> > distribution.
> > Cheers, Peter
> 
> http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20080320.203129.aec3fb49.en.html

Seems to be fixed now:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427528

Cheers, Peter

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Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

[George N. White III]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Armando Martins <cidadaum@sapo.pt> wrote:

> Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?
> Thomas Schmitz told me OpenSuse (which I 've been using for a year...) is
> not that Tex-friendly...

You need to say a bit more about your circumstances and goals.   90% of TeX
should work well (excepting experimental bits like luatex, xetex, and ConTeXt
MKiV which may need some tweaks) on all current platforms, but if you are
constrained by site policy to use binary packages provided by your
distribution,
that is an entirely different problem from whether you can use TeX
Live from CTAN.

If you rely heavily on .dvi and want a viewer (e.g., kpdf) that is
integrated with your
desktop, then your options are more limited, but you should think
about switching to
a PDF workflow (because it is well supported outside the TeX
community, there are
more and better tools for PDF than for DVI).

-- 
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
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