LaTeX installation on RHEL-derivatives

Rocky Linux Help & Support
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What’s the recommended way of installing (and keeping up to date!) LaTeX bundle on RHEL-based distributions?

For example, on Debian (Ubuntu, etc…) apt install texlive-full with optional apt install texstudio will give you a comprehensive distribution with competent editor.

Using Rocky (RHEL, Alma, etc) the strategy appears to be:

  1. Install from “base” and/or AppStreams; if not found:
  2. Install from EPEL; if still not found:
  3. Install from Flathub.

Which works for more or less self-contained applications, but does not work for large bundles or linked libraries like ROCm or LaTeX, etc.

Is there a canonical way to resolve this problem?

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Mostly you use repos, so it would be the texlive packages that are in the main repos or epel after that.

Perhaps you should be more clear and provide more detail as to what is not working? What are you missing? Perhaps search pkgs.org for the package you require to see what repo it’s in as well as what distribution.

If you are looking for newer packages than the default in Rocky, then you have the wrong distribution. In which case, use something like Fedora.

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But is there texlive in either?.. RPM resource texlive

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Use this command:

dnf list texlive*

plenty of output when I run that command, in fact 454 texlive packages. Be more specific in what your problem is. What are you missing?

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Also, if you must use a site to search, use the one I already suggested, because rpmfind is not great. pkgs.org is much better, results for searching texlive: https://pkgs.org/search/?q=texlive

1 Like
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That is from base repos and EPEL, I presume.

Yum repositories may define groups of packages in their metadata.
An AlmaLinux 9 I do get:

$ dnf group list --hidden -v | grep -i tex
   TeX formatting system (texlive)

and see that there is a group “TeX formatting system”. I can get its list with

$ dnf group info texlive

and dnf group install texlive (or dnf install @texlive) would install the mandatory and default packages from the list. (There is some option to get the optional too.)

The group might not include all packages that are in the repositories, but is a starting point.

Yes, the base repositories do provide only a subset of LaTeX packages. Red Hat (and hence Rocky) has no incentive to build (and maintain) RPM packages for everything LaTeX.

The EPEL repository provides additional packages for EL distros. That includes some LaTeX packages. (Looks like ~80 in EPEL 9.) They are naturally for the version of texlive that is in the base repo.

The ~450 RPM packages do probably provide more than 450 LaTeX packages, but certainly not all the ~7000 in CTAN.

How does one install packages from CTAN if one has “source install” of texlive?

I recall downloading one or two packages and placing them in some subdirectory of my home directory. A place that the LaTeX commands did look from (in additional to the system directories where RPM packages put the files).

If there is a way to tell the commands (via environment variables or some config file) to look from one more directory, then one could make such (outside of system and home directories) and put the non-RPM-packaged LaTEX packages there. This is what I do with Python modules, R packages, well any additional software that is not available as RPM. (The directories are also on NFS share, so I effectively install not just for all users of machine, but for all machines in lab.)

There is environment modules (package environment-modules, or alternatively Lmod from EPEL) tool to help user modify their environment (e.g. add dir to PATH). I.e. I put program in non-standard location and add “module file” to known place, so user can “load module” and then shell environment to use program is ready.

This, I believe, is “canonical” on HPC systems.

1 Like
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Oh, that’s neat! dnf group info texlive | wc returns 380 matches on Rocky 10. Solved.

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