Give me TeX or give me Death!

April 3, 2006 3:04 PM

In an effort to increase productivity, I've been trying to escape my all-too-familiar laptop with all its enticing shortcuts and bookmarks and start using my school's sexy G5 workstations. How can I install teTeX or some other LaTeX package on these babies without root?

My general plan so far has been to copy applications to my iPod or an sftp site I manage, then pull them out as needed. Unfortunately, I've hit a roadblock installing teTeX, it looks like I'm going to need to manually build the libraries and binaries then port those over.

I'm a bit lost on the manual installation for a G5, anybody done this before? I can do a ./configure, make, make install, but it seems like it's going to be a real pain with all the package dependencies. Anybody know of a teTeX/laTeX disk image I can just copy over, or a way to install Fink locally that won't explode?

As a last resort, I'm happy to take advantage of anybody's configuration instructions or pre-built binaries for a G5 on OS X.4.

posted by onalark to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Well, I'm pretty sure you can install Fink into any directory you like. It LIKES using the /sw directory, but I believe you can put it in your home directory. You'll have to update your local PATH commands to include the bin directories it makes, but that shouldn't be too hard. I think you'd also have to update your library path.

I think the Fink installer will do this automatically for you.... have you tried that?

If you can mount your iPod on a specific, known mountpoint, you could also install Fink there. You would need to manually copy the profile changes it makes to each machine, but that doesn't take long. I'm not sure I'd want to use an iPod for that, though... those drives aren't meant to be on all the time, and the Mac would be constantly hitting it if it was in your search path. Maybe a cheapo external Firewire drive instead?
posted by Malor at 3:23 PM on April 3, 2006

Alternately, have you approached the IT staff about getting TeX installed? It's a _very_ well-known package. If I were IT in an educational institution, I'd fall all over myself to get that running for you... I know how important it can be for some folks.
posted by Malor at 3:25 PM on April 3, 2006

My first reaction was to email the technical support for my school. I couldn't believe they didn't have TeX installed either. They have yet to reply to me :( I'll take a crack at putting the Fink on without root tonight.
posted by onalark at 3:30 PM on April 3, 2006

You can also try i-Installer, which is a bit like Fink but focuses specifically on *Tex. I find it a bit less fussy than Fink.
posted by drmarcj at 4:45 PM on April 3, 2006

i-Installer is definitely out since it requires me to install a pkg file, which requires root access. (Unless you know a way around this).
posted by onalark at 5:27 PM on April 3, 2006

If you do end up going the ./configure route, make sure to configure with a prefix that is writeable by you, e.g. "./configure --prefix=$HOME/foo" This means you can then do "make install" and everything gets put under ~/foo instead of the default. Normally you can use this method to install any package as a regular user. The only wrinkle comes in when you need to specify that you want to use a copy of an installed library that is not the system default, but you can normally get that going by something like "./configure --prefix=$HOME/foo CFLAGS="-I$HOME/foo/include" LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/foo/lib"". Note if the package uses the older 2.13 version of autoconf you'll have to put the variable overrides before the "./configure", as in "CFLAGS=foo ./configure".
posted by Rhomboid at 11:17 PM on April 3, 2006

Well screw me, looks like Fink won't install without root privileges either. I think I'm gonna give up soon.
posted by onalark at 1:05 PM on April 7, 2006

looks like rhomboid has a pretty good solution. A user in a unix like environment should be able to install programs in their home folder.... Should.
posted by Freen at 2:43 PM on April 28, 2006

Update: The school installed the huge sumo-ball teTex package I pointed them to on all their OS X machines!
posted by onalark at 10:37 AM on May 1, 2006