Re: TeTeX on Redhat and shared texmf TeXLive 6
This correspondence has prompted me to write on a topic that has concerned me for a while. Our department's main teaching and research computing resource is now provided by a network of Linux machines, running Red Hat, each of which has local copies of as much software as possible. We keep them up to date by using rpms to update the local copies. This means that they are now running the version of teTeX available in the tetex-*-1.0.6-11 series of rpms, which are now quite old. Updating such a large number of machines without the necessary rpms does not appear to be an option. It would appear that, to keep teTeX reasonably current, we need to switch to a single, centrally maintained copy. Do others have the same problems, or any bright ideas to solve them? Thanks Graham
Re: TeTeX on Redhat and shared texmf TeXLive 6
On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Graham Gough wrote: This correspondence has prompted me to write on a topic that has concerned me for a while. Our department's main teaching and research computing resource is now provided by a network of Linux machines, running Red Hat, each of which has local copies of as much software as possible. We keep them up to date by using rpms to update the local copies. This means that they are now running the version of teTeX available in the tetex-*-1.0.6-11 series of rpms, which are now quite old. Updating such a large number of machines without the necessary rpms does not appear to be an option. It would appear that, to keep teTeX reasonably current, we need to switch to a single, centrally maintained copy. Do others have the same problems, or any bright ideas to solve them? Thanks Graham There is a middle ground between keeping systems at a common readily available level (e.g., the vendor RPM's for your Linux distro) and providing access to current packages. You can use the TEXMFCNF variable to point to a localized texmf/web2c directory with the .fmt and .pool files, and maintain a local texmf tree for newer versions and additions to the vendor supplied tree. This local stuff can be NFS mounted, with the result that most of the files will still come from the vendor tree, or copied to the local machines if NFS performance is a problem. It can be useful to have access to the vendor-supplied configurations because so many people at other sites are using them. It is also useful to be able to test updates via a texmf-test/web2c directory before putting them on all your systems. Unfortunately, there are some issues that go beyond the texmf tree. Many TeX documents use the laserwriter 35 fonts, which in practice means the URW clones from ghostscript. My Mandrake 7.1 Linux distro provides older versions of these fonts than the SGI freeware distro at work, but the texmf trees on both systems have the old versions. On Mandrake 7.1 linux the old URW fonts are used by xfs and ghostscript (e.g., to print on a non-PS printer), so just updating the texmf tree doesn't solve the problem. -- George White [EMAIL PROTECTED] Halifax, Nova Scotia
Re: Tetex on HP-UX11
We have received a new HP-UX machine and the output of uname -a is HP-UX goliath B.11.00 U 9000/800 I tried to build teTeX from source but this failed. Is this possible in a limited timeframe? (my boss is supicious of everyone not using word on windows, so I cannot spend much time on this) It's hard to give you advise, since uou haven't said what you tried, what compiler you used, or what went wrong. It could be as simple as setting the paths to the X11 libraries. I haven't compiled tetex under 11.0, but I have under 10.20. I had lots of problems with HP's make getting confused by the tetex makefile. While I did get it to compile with HP's make, I suggest installing gnu make first, and using that. Chris Goedde
Re: TeTeX on Redhat and shared texmf TeXLive 6
Graham, Our department's main teaching and research computing resource is now provided by a network of Linux machines, running Red Hat, each of which has local copies of as much software as possible. We keep them up to date by using rpms to update the local copies. Sounds like you need a local RPM mirror. I'm in a similar situation except all my machines are running the Debian distribution. I have a local mirror which gets updated once a day. Whenever I feel a new version is warranted on my machines, I simply ssh to each client, apt-get update, apt-get install tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-extra. Debian's apt-get program takes care of all the dependencies for you. I don't know if the latest Red Hat will do this sort of thing or not. The alternative is to have an NFS mounted /usr/local where you compile teTeX from scratch whenever a new version comes out. All of your client machines use this instead of a local /usr/local. Depending on how many machines you have and how long it would take you to upgrade the RPM's on all of them, this might be a better way to go. This also has advantages for installing other programs that aren't packaged as RPM's because you only install it once and it's available to everyone. Chris -- Christopher S. Swingley 930 Koyukuk Drive System / Network ManagerUniversity of Alaska Fairbanks IARC -- Frontier ProgramFairbanks, AK 99775 phone: 907-474-2689 fax: 907-474-2643 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]GNUPG and PGP2 keys at my web site web: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle