Getting the latest version of TeXLive on Fedora 16

In line with Fedora's (and many other Linux distributions') design philosophy, all installed packages should be managed centrally through yum. This is great in principal, because it allows all software on the system to be updated with a single click.

The downside is that not all desired packages are available through Fedora's official repositories. Or, if they are, they may not be regularly updated and properly maintained. The Fedora team also strips out package features that allow updates independent of the operating system.

In this case, I wanted to use TeXLive 2011, but the pre-installed version is TeXLive 2007 (recall that this is the middle of 2012). An update seems to be in progress, but won't be 100% complete until Fedora 17 [1].

Even if TeXLive 2011 was available, however, the policy on banning alternate update methods means that a part of the TeXLive distribution, tlmgr will be stripped out. tlmgr allows connection to a LaTeX repository and automates the installation/removal of LaTeX packages.

Since I needed some external packages and tlmgr, I downloaded TeXLive manually (see here for instructions). I also needed to install some packages not available via LaTeX repositories. Here's how to install packages using tlmgr and by hand:

By tlmgr

BASH is unable to find tlmgr without being told its location. To do so, use the export command. The overall process of launching tlmgr is

• Log into shell as root user.
• Run: export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH
• Run: tlmgr --gui
• Install packages via the GUI

By hand

• Log into shell as root user
• Run: mkdir /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf/tex/latex/[directory_name]
• Run: mv [file_path] [new_directory_path]
• Run: texhash /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf

texhash updates the package database.

Notes
[1] In the meantime, partial updates can be installed using directions found here.