The teTeX HOWTO: The Linux-teTeX Local Guide: 3. PERFORMING THE ACTUAL INSTALLATION.

3. 3. PERFORMING THE ACTUAL INSTALLATION.

First, FTP to your nearest Linux archive site. Mine is

 wuarchive.wustl.edu

then find the directory with the Slackware distribution diskettes. On wuarchive, this is

 systems/linux/sunsite/distributions/Slackware/slakware

Linux sites which mirror sunsite.edu will store these diskettes in the directory distributions/Slackware/slakware. teTeX, the full package, is contained on the Slackware disk series t. So, grab all nine disks' worth of the t series, disks t1 - t9. Be sure to keep them in order, too. Either store the files them in separate subdirectories labeled t1 - t9 on a hard drive partition, or on diskettes, and label the diskettes t1 through t9. We're going to install them by hand.

This isn't difficult. The Slackware installer creates the directories and unpacks the files. It also provides descriptions of each module in the distribution which allows you to decide whether you want to install it or not. In the case of teTeX, however, you are simply going to install everything, because that's what you should do anyway.

Installation will require about 30 Mb of disk space, so you should make sure that it's available before you start. You don't need to have the gcc compiler or the X Windows System installed (although X certainly is helpful because then you can preview documents on-screen). All you need is an editor that is capable of producing plain ASCII text (see above). What could be simpler?

Let's assume that you have all nine diskettes' worth of the Slackware teTeX distribution ready at hand, organized as described above. You'll have a lot of files which have the extension .tgz. This is shorthand for a gzipped tar archive. The names all fit the 8+3 filename limitations of MS-DOG. Aren't you glad you decided to scrap your DOG partitions and install Linux instead? You can use a MS-DOG hard disk partition or DOG-format diskettes to store the files. The archives also begin with the letters tb, td, or tm, and so on, which is the implementors' shorthand for TeX binary, TeX documentation, TeX macro, and so on. The difference to you is academic, because you'll be installing everything anyway.

Let's assume that you've assembled the Slackware distribution on floppy diskettes labelled t1 thru t9. Mount the t1 diskette like this

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

if your Linux configuration is a standard Slackware configuration like mine. Actually, any mount point will do. You'll simply need to substitute the appropriate path spec in the next few steps.

The next thing you want to do is create the teTeX top-level directory. teTeX's internal paths are specified relative to its binaries, but the Slackware distribution is archived relative to the root directory. So the top-level teTeX directory is

/usr/lib/teTeX

so, for each of the .tgz archive files in the distribution, copy the archive file to the /usr/lib/teTeX directory and repeat the following commands:

You should be logged in as root and in the top-level directory, /, for these steps. I've used the tb-xfig.tgz archive for demonstration purposes. Of course, you'll want to substitute the name of whichever archive you're unpacking.

cp /mnt/tb-xfig.tgz /usr/lib/teTeX   
gunzip /usr/lib/teTeX/tb-xfig.tgz
tar -xvf /usr/lib/teTeX/tb-xfig.tar  # v to see what's going on!
rm /usr/lib/teTeX/tb-xfig.tar

Most Slackware packages that I've seen also include an install script, which the Slackware installer executes after unpacking the files. Look in the directory /install after you've unpacked the files. If there's a script there called doinst.sh or something similar, execute that, as root, by typing


sh </install/doinst.sh

It's quite a rush, isn't it, watching all those filenames zipping by on the screen while the archives unpack onto your hard drive. Relax! Take a break, and freshen up your coffee (or grab another JOLT from the refrigerator, or otherwise replenish whatever you're drinking). There's only a few more steps you need to perform to install teTeX. We'll take them in increasing order of difficulty.

The first thing you'll want to do is look at Thomas Esser's README file. It contains a lot of hints on how to configure teTeX for your output device (i.e., printer). The README file is located in the directory

/usr/lib/teTeX/texmf/doc/tetex

Read the file over with the command

less /usr/lib/teTeX/texmf/doc/tetex/README

or even better, print it out with the command

cat /usr/lib/teTeX/texmf/doc/tetex/README >/dev/lp0

assuming that your printer is connected to /dev/lp0. Substitute the appropriate device driver file as appropriate.

Repeat these steps with the teTeX-FAQ. Keep the FAQ handy because it contains useful hints for configuring teTeX's output drivers for your printer. We'll get to that in a moment.

It is disappointing that the Linux Slackware Distribution doesn't come with a standard lpr daemon. That's probably because of the wide variations in printing hardware, but that's only my semi-informed guess. Setting up a working printer daemon is no mean feat. If you're using teTeX on an individual system, you can simply dump the output to the printer, but this is less than desirable. You lose the filtering capabilities of the printer daemon. If you're printing on a network, having a working printer daemon is a must.

I wrote the first version of this HOWTO before I saw Grant Taylor's Printing-HOWTO. It's a must-read for setting up a print spooler. It really works! This may seem like a digression, but the time spent setting up a print spooler now pays off later.

Back to TeX. You next want to define a directory to store your own TeX format files. teTeX searches the directories listed by the $TEXINPUTS environment variable for local TeX input files. On Chanel3, I added the line

export TEXINPUTS=".:~/texinputs:"

to the system-wide /etc/profile file. Of course, you must have logged in as root before you can do this. The $TEXINPUTS environment variable tells teTeX to look for users' individual TeX style files in the ~/texinputs directories under each user's home directory. It is CRITICAL that a colon appear before and after this directory. teTeX is going to append its own directory searches to your own. You want to have teTeX to search the local format files first, so it uses the local versions of any of the standard files you have edited.

Add the /usr/lib/teTeX/bin directory to system-wide path in whatever manner you usually do this, and restart the system to make sure the path and TEXINPUTS are registered properly; that is, globally.

Now, log in as the system administrator and run texconfig per the instructions in the teTeX-FAQ and choose the printer that is attached to your system. Make sure that you configure teTeX for both the correct printer and printer resolution.