[tex-live] Report of pretest intallation in Windows XP and 7.

[Dan Luecking]

I have installed the pretest on window XP SP3, and on Windows 7.
Mostly it went well. I installed a custom scheme and all errors
(except one, but I'll get to that) seem to have been my fault.

Once I had everything installed, I installed some extra packages,
deleted others, and ran tlmgr update --all. All went well on both
machines.

The winXP installation was on my office computer with a fast
internet connection. It completed in just over 1 hour with no
problems.

The win7 installation was on my laptop with a home DSL connection.
It took a little over 3 hours total, with a glitch at about 2.5
hours, probably due to a corrupted download.

I have only two concerns.

1. Th mentioned glitch was a message from tar, complaining of
"unexpected end of (something)" followed by a pop up window
saying perl "has stopped working" and the installation aborted.
I think this was a corrupted download of xifthen. It seems
strange that an error in tar could lead to perl hanging, but
that could be windows-specific.

When I reran install-tl.bat after the abort, it detected the
aborted installation (file installation.profile detected) and,
successfully completed the installation in about 45min. It
did not, however, remove installation.profile, which affected
future test-runs.

2. I was using install-tl-advanced.bat. The gui asks one question
on winXP that it doesn't ask on win7:
    Install for all users?
This is a concern because I still had TL2011 in my system path
on both machines. The system path is pre-pended to a user-specific
path. If I don't install 2012 for all users, the 2012 binaries
come after the 2011 binaries. On winXP I answered the question
"No" and the above problem occured, requiring me to correct
the paths by hand.

I decided to answer the question differntly on win7, but the
question was not asked! The 2012 binaries were added to my
user path and I again had to correct the paths by hand.


For both these I was using install-tl-20120522. I have since
checked install-tl-20120523 on win7 (still not asking) and
this morning install-tl-20120524 on winXP (still asking).

That last one had fully functioning vertical scroll bars (but
no horizontal scroll bars).

I have so far used pdftex in 2012 to create a quiz, without
problems (both dvi and pdf output). I've use kpsewhich with
expected results and also tlmgr.

BTW, both systems are single-user in practice. I have for a long
time been setting
   TEXMFVAR = $TEXMFSYSVAR
   TEXMFCONFIG = $TEXMFSYSCONFIG
in the texmf.cnf in the TeX Live root directory. Thus updmap and
updmap-sys do the same thing and I have never had the problems
recently discussed on the TeX Live mailing list.

Thanks for the excellent work and best regards,

Dan


Daniel H. Luecking
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Fayetteville, Arkansas
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html