How to install texlive (full) on Fedora 17 - and why

Fedora provides a texlive package (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive), however it is incomplete, usually out of date and I haven’t been able to easily install new latex packages through it. In theory new packages can be installed by issuing the command:

yum install 'tex(epsfig.sty)'

However this never worked for me, and despite some searching I couldn’t work out what was going wrong.

Personally, as someone with plenty of free disk space, I’ve found the best solution is to install the full version of texlive. Certainly, ever since doing so I’ve never had any problems compiling my latex files and haven’t had to think about the install ever since.

This excellent post on the tex StackExchange describes in detail how to do this with Ubuntu: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/95373 which I would recommend reading before following any of the advice here

For fedora it may be slightly different (especially in faking packages, see step 1 below), but in summary what I did was as follows:

1. Install the official package from fedora using ‘yum install texlive’ (so that software with tex as a dependency can be installed)
2. Download the installer for the full texlive from http://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html
3. Run the install-tl script
4. Make sure the install path is /opt (or /opt/texlive if you’d like)
5. Add /opt/texlive/2012/bin/x86_64-linux (with the correct year) to the path (see e.g. http://askubuntu.com/questions/60218/how-to-add-a-directory-to-my-path if unsure how to do this) making sure it’s added before /usr/bin so the correct latex programs are used rather than the ones from fedora’s texlive package
6. If using some software such as texmaker to edit and compile your latex, make sure it is correctly configured to run pdflatex, biber etc. from /opt/texlive/2012/bin/x86_64-linux (e.g for texmaker follow the instructions at http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/doc.html#SECTION02)

Advantages

• A lot more packages are included
• tlmgr is included, which allows incredibly easy installation of new packages from ctan (tlmgr install package-name)

Disadvantages

• Not integrated into fedora’s package management
  • You’ll now have to manually update using tlmgr update --self tlmgr update --all rather than it simply working through yum (though there may be a way around this, I haven’t looked into it)
• Uses a lot of space (something like 3-4GiB)