On Sep 15, 2008, at 7:31 PM, Matija Šuklje wrote:

Dne ponedeljek 15. septembra 2008 je Martin Schröder napisal(a):

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2008/9/15 Armando Martins :

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Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?

Debian. The maintainer (Norbert Preining) actually visits TeX conferences and was in Bohinj. :-)

I use Gentoo and am pretty happy with the modular TeX Live ebuilds, but on top of my head, I'd also say Debian would probably be (alongside Slackware and Gentoo) one of the distros with the biggest TeX userbase.

If bandwith is an issue (i.e. if you're on a slow connection), modular builds are important. If you have a need for religious service and are convinced locusts and floods will ensue if you install something without using the official (TM) authentic (TM) package manager of your distribution, by all means, choose your distribution very carefully. But if these points aren't important to you, please just use the TeXLive installer on ANY linux distribution and install. TeXLive now has a wonderful tlmgr program which will help you keep up to date; this will probably be much faster than any packaging system (with the possible exception of Debian, unless Norbert is stuck in the mountains without internet access...) SuSE 10.X used to have a habit of setting certain environment variables (such as $TEXINPUTS) without bothering to tell the user about it; I think this is no longer the case in 11.0. I really didn't mean to say that the problems you reported a while ago were connected to your linux distribution. The most important piece of advice I can give: please please please install just one TeX system and STICK WITH IT. Either TeXLive or the TeX system offered by your distribution or the ConTeXt minimals - but not all of them; that would be fine for an advanced user but needlessly confusing for a beginner. Thomas

http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20080320.203129.aec3fb49.en.html

Argh :-) Setting TEXINPUTS is not at all friendly, that's for sure. Arthur

On Sep 18, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Peter Münster wrote:

You're right, but I've to protect suse a bit: this was only an issue with a very new MKIV (new logic how to use TEXINPUTS), and suse could really not know about that. TEXINPUTS was quite useful, because every user could put his own personal directory in it, and there did not need to be an ls-R file.

Cheers, Peter

Well, no offense, I used to be a big fan of SuSE myself (still like it a lot, but their package manager really needs work). But: I just double-checked, and TEXINPUTS is still set on my 11.0 system - even though I don't have any SuSE-provided TeX-system installed. That's really unpardonable. I can understand why they want to set it for their own TeXLive packages, but not on a virgin system without any TeX component. For an inexperienced user who wants to install TeXLive from DVD or via the net installer, this will be a major obstacle. So I think the point remains valid: SuSE is not a TeX-friendly distribution. Thomas

On Wed, Sep 17 2008, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:

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What's the issue with suse? I'm using it since 1995 without problems. Now I'm just adding the minimals to /opt/context to have up to date luatex and context versions. When I need latex, I use the suse texlive distribution. Cheers, Peter

http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20080320.203129.aec3fb49.en.html

Seems to be fixed now: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427528 Cheers, Peter -- http://pmrb.free.fr/contact/