Re: TeTeX on Redhat and shared texmf TeXLive 6

2001-07-12 Thread Graham Gough


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

2001-07-12 Thread George White


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

2001-07-12 Thread Chris Goedde


 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

2001-07-12 Thread Christopher S. Swingley


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