[tex-live] 2007 TeX Live distribution

[George N. White III]

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 9:28 PM, David Anderson <dlande.spam at gmail.com> wrote:

> This past January (2009) I picked up a TeX Live DVD at the Joint Math
> Meetings.  This December I finally tried installing it on my netbook, which
> of course doesn't have a DVD drive.  My solution was to copy it off of the
> DVD to an external hard drive, and use that.
>
> The machine for copying runs Windows XP.
>
> Every attempt to install TeX Live from the external hard drive to the
> netbook failed, despite following all the documentation available,
> supplemented by significant web searching.
>
> Finally I found a 12-hour block of time in which the 2009 version of TeX
> Live could be downloaded (it actually took 11), and it worked perfectly the
> first time.
>
> My working hypothesis for the failure of the 2007 distribution is that the
> XP machine didn't include the Rock Ridge data in the copying process, though
> I'm afraid I do not know how I could confirm this.  If this is the case,
> perhaps an explicit warning to this effect in the documentation is
> warranted.

Most external hard drives come formatted with a simple filesystem that
can be used by many OS's.  If you use exclusively Windows XP and later,
it makes sense to convert external drives to NTFS format.

You don't mention the OS of the netbook.  With a windows netbook you can
share a DVD directly via the network from a Windows machine: "right click on
the DVD drive and select share>Advanced sharing."

With a linux netbook it should be possible to put a image of the DVD on an
external drive and mount using the loop device.

There has also been some discussion of copying an install from from one
system to another or sharing TL on a network server.


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