[texhax] Do not symlink when installing TeXLive 2008 on K/Ubuntu Intrepid or Debian systems

[R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar]

Dear Folks,

I have just installed TeXLive 2008 from DVD on my Kubuntu Intrepid 
system. I thought that it would save me having to edit the .bashrc files 
if I chose the symlink option during installation, and did so.

This choice inadvertently led to problems later on when apt-get and dpkg 
would not install or remove packages successfully.

To cut a long story short, I discovered that TeXLive 2008 installs GNU 
install-info while Debian's package manager uses Debian install-info, 
and the two are not the same. Since the former is searched first after 
symlinking, it is used instead of the latter, and package installation 
or removal fails. See these bug reports for more info:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gv/+bug/316557

and

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gettext/+bug/301522

My workaround has been to remove all symlinks and to export the paths as 
suggested at

http://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-310003.4.2

so:

PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/bin/i386-linux:$PATH; export PATH
MANPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH; export MANPATH
INFOPATH=/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf/doc/info:$INFOPATH; export  INFOPATH

In this way, it is only the user's paths that are altered, not root's, 
and the GNU/Debian conflict for install-info does not arise.

Finally, if tlmgr is later run as

sudo tlmgr -gui

for updating, it is necessary to specify the full path and invoke it as

sudo /usr/local/texlive/2008/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr -gui

or whatever is appropriate for your architecture.

I hope this helps to save others some time or grief.

Chandra