Introduction to TeX Live and its installer
The TeX Live package is a
comprehensive TeX document production system. It includes TeX,
LaTeX2e, LuaLaTeX, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX and many other
programs; an extensive collection of macros, fonts and
documentation; and support for typesetting in many different
scripts from around the world.
This page is for people who wish to use the binary installer to
provide the programs, the scripts, and a lot of supporting files
and documentation. The installer is updated frequently, so any
published md5sum will soon be out of date. Newer versions of the
installer are expected to work with these instructions, for so long
as they install to a 2025/ directory.
There are two reasons why you may wish to install the binaries in
BLFS: either you need a smaller install (e.g. at a minimum plain
TeX without LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc), or you wish to use tlmgr to get updates whilst this
version is supported (typically, until March of the year after it
was released). For the latter, you might prefer to install in your
/home directory as an unprivileged
user, and to then make corresponding changes to the PATH in your
~/.bashrc or equivalent.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
If you wish to use ConTeXt with luametatex (most of the old
MKII and MKIV code was removed from TeX Live 2023 by the ConTeXt
developer), using the binary is probably the easiest option. The
source no-longer ships with TeX Live and is poorly adapted to
building with systems except those running Mac and Windows. See
comments 1 to 5 of #17823.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 12.4
platform.
Package Information
-
Download (HTTP):
https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
-
Download MD5 sum: Varies frequently
-
Download size: 5.5 MB
-
Estimated disk space required: 90 MB for plain TeX, typically
323 MB for latex and later engines, 9.0 GB if everything is
included
-
Estimated build time: varies, depending on network speed and
traffic
Recommended
GnuPG-2.4.8 (to validate both the initial
downloads, and also any updates you might later make using
tlmgr) and libwww-perl-6.79 (to use a single
connection to the server, which will reduce its load and speed
things up)
Recommended (at runtime)
The binaries are mostly linked to included static libraries or
general (LFS) system libraries, but a few of the programs and
several scripts will fail if the following packages are not
present:
ghostscript-10.05.1 is dynamically loaded
by the external application dvisvgm, which is used by asy when that creates SVG files.
Xorg
Libraries and libxcb-1.17.0 are needed for inimf, mf,
pdfclose, pdfopen and xdvi-xaw. But if you are using asy, or using
a TeX engine to create a PDF file,
you will need a graphical
environment (for PDF files, this is to support a PDF viewer of
your choice, for example epdfview-gtk3-20200814).
The binary version of asy needs
Freeglut-3.6.0.
The binary version of xindy is
linked to libcrypt.so.1 from old
versions of glibc. To use the
application, follow the Note about binary-only applications in
libxcrypt in LFS
Chapter 8 to install the ABI version 1 crypt library.
Note
As always with contributed binary software, it is possible that
the required dependencies may change when the installer is
updated. In particular, these dependencies have only been checked
on x86_64.
Python2
is used by the unmaintained ebong CTAN module (intended for writing
Bengali in Rapid Roman Format). /usr/bin/python is also in the shebang line for
the latex-papersize and lilyglyphs scripts, and documentation at
CTAN says both modules have been updated to work with python3. In
pythontex there are scripts to invoke python3 or python2 according
to the system's version of python. Ruby-3.4.5 is used by
two scripts, one is for pTex (Japanese vertical writing) and the
other is match_parens which might be generally useful. The perl
module
Tk, which needs to be run from an X11 session to run the tests
and requires Tk-8.6.16 is used by one of the scripts for ptex
and is needed for texdoctk (a GUI interface for finding
documentation files and opening them with the appropriate viewer).
ps2pdf, from
ghostscript-10.05.1, is used by some
utilities and scripts.
Binary Installation of TeX Live
The TeX Live set of programs with
its supporting documents, fonts, and utilities is very large. The
upstream maintainers recommend placing all files in a single
directory structure. The BLFS team recommends /opt/texlive.
Note
If you have chosen to install the binary as a normal user, the
directory for the prefix needs to be writable by that user. The
root user can chown /opt/texlive/2025 to that user before the user
starts the install. If any later change in that directory is made
by the root user, that will change the ownership, which
breaks usage by normal users.
As with any other package, unpack the installer and change into its
directory, install-tl-<CCYYMMDD>. This directory name
changes when the installer is updated, so replace <CCYYMMDD>
by the correct directory name.
Note
The distribution binaries installed below may use static linking
for general linux system libraries. Additional libraries or
interpreters as specified in the dependencies section do not need
to be present during the install, but the programs that need them
will not run until their specific dependencies have been
installed.
With all contributed binary software, there may be a mismatch
between the builder's toolchain and your hardware. In most of TeX
this will probably not matter, but in uncommon corner cases you
might hit problems. For example, if your x86_64 processor does
not support 3dnowext or 3dnow, the 2014-06-28 binary failed in
conTeXt when running LuaTeX, although lualatex worked, as did the
i686 binaries on the same machine. In such cases, the easiest
solution is to install texlive from source. Similarly, the x86_64
binary version of asy runs very slowly when
creating 3-D diagrams.
Now, as the root user:
TEXLIVE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/texlive ./install-tl
This command is interactive and allows selection or modification of
platform, packages, directories, and other options. The time to
complete the download will depend on your internet connection speed
and the number of packages selected.
For a minimal install that will build documentation that is
referenced in BLFS, the only installation collections needed are
'[a] Essential programs and files' and '[D] LaTeX fundamental
packages'. This will download about 132 files and use about 323 MB.
Users can select other collections as needed but a full
installation will download several thousand files and use over 8GB.
Note
After installation, the PATH environment variable will need to be
updated, and other variables will need to be set. Please refer to
Setting the PATH for TeX Live
to set these environment variables.