[tex-live] installing TeXLive

[George N. White III]

2010/3/12 Herbert Voss <Herbert.Voss at fu-berlin.de>:
> Hi,
> today I installed TeXLive with my students on 16 computers.
> I have to use VMware for running Linux under Windows.
> On every computer and with every mirror I get errors
> like
>
> ./tlpkg/installer/xz/xzdec.i386-linux: (stdin): Unexpected end of input
> tar: Das sieht nicht wie ein „tar“-Archiv aus.
> tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
> untar: untarring /home/voss/texlive/temp/tap.tar failed (in
> /home/voss/texlive/texmf-dist)
> untarring /home/voss/texlive/temp/tap.tar failed, stopping install.
> Installation failed.
> Rerunning the installer will try to restart the installation.
> Or you can restart by running the installer with:
>  install-tl --profile installation.profile [EXTRA-ARGS]
> Writing log file to current working directory.
> voss at linux-f5ux:~/Downloads/install-tl-20100311>
> ------------------------------
>
> restarting with using the mirror of my own university
> (ftp.fu-berlin.de) doesn't really helped. I have no idea if
> this might be a problem of VMware, which runs under Windows XP.
> It was a bit curious, because it was not the same package
> where the installer stopped on the different computers.
>
> Herbert

I've been assuming that errors like these are mostly due to internet
breakage, including traffic shaping.   Installing TL requires an
unusual volume of network traffic and may be triggering some
protection mechanisms at your site.

How much memory and disk do the VM's have.  My experience
with computer labs is that they are often set up for simple programming
and often don't have memory or disk for large applications.

There might be some hints in the system logs or the
windows event viewer.

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