linux installations

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

Dear all (and especially the linux heads...),

I have been playing with my linux partition lately and looking at the  
linux installation section in the wiki. I see there are two approaches:
- take the minimal linux distribution that Hans prepares,
- start from TexLive

I see why these approaches have their advantages. Nevertheless, I  
would want to add a further point: shouldn't we provide some hints  
for those who have a working TeX installation on linux and want to  
keep it because they are not (yet) exclusive ConTeXt users and want  
to be able to upgrade with their distribution's system?

I have played around with several distros and think some general  
points could go into the wiki:

1. look at texmf.cnf; find out where TEXMFLOCAL is on your system. In  
most distros, the directory doesn't exist yet, create it.

2. In the definitions of texmf.cnf, make sure that TEXMFLOCAL comes  
before the other TEXMF trees.

3. unzip cont-tmf.zip into this directory, run mktexlsr or texhash

4. run texexec --make --al

This last step gave and still gives me some headaches (my last  
attempt was with Opensuse 10.1 alpha 4), and that's where I ask for  
some elucidation: texexec does not rely on kpsewhich to locate the  
directory where it dumps the formats. So what I've seen happening is  
that I have brandnew formats in one place, yet texexec --version will  
still display the old versions (or say somehting like "cont-en.fmt  
unknown"). I have often just found out where kpsewhich searches for  
the formats and then replaced these old formats with symlinks to the  
new ones, but I'm not quite sure if this is a good approach. Does  
anyone have more insights on this? What's with this proliferation of  
TEXMF-trees in recent versions of teTeX: which ones do we actually  
need? Which ones can be deleted safely?

Thanks

Thomas