Updating TexLive on Ubuntu

17 Jun 2020

This post is intended to help you install the latest version of TeXLive (including pdflatex, xelatex, and many other things). If you haven’t installed TexLive on your system yet, please jump directly to Step 4. These instructions should also work on Mac, but I have tested them only on an Ubuntu system.

Of course, TexLive can be installed from Ubuntu’s software repository. While that method is easier and probably more polular, it never gives you the latest version of Tex and other related software. Therefore, it’s not at all an option for updating to the latest version.

Let’s get started now.

Find out the latest version of TexLive available for installation
Go to this page and check for the information on latest version. Currently, it is TexLive 2020.
Find your installed version
Open a terminal, and run this command:
```
tex --version
```
This command will print many lines, but information we want is in the very first line. If the year is less than 2020, it’s probably a good idea to update.

Removing the installed version of TeXLive
Before installing the latest version of TexLive, it’s better to remove the version you already have. To remove TexLive completely, run the following commands, one after the other, in a Terminal.

sudo apt-get purge texlive*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/*
rm -rf ~/.texlive*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/texmf
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/texmf
sudo rm -rf /etc/texmf
sudo apt-get remove tex-common --purge
rm -rf ~/.texlive

Installing TexLive
- Download the .tar.gz file from the link given here.
- Extract the contents of the file to a suitable location. After extraction you should see a directory with a name similar to install-tl-20200615. Inside this directory, among other things, there is a file by name install-tl.
- Open a Terminal, navigate to the aforementioned directory, and run the following command.
```
perl install-tl
```
  This starts the installation process which goes on for a long time (A little more than an hour on my laptop).
Updating the PATH variable
After all the packages are installed, we have update the PATH variable with the installation location of the files. This is just a way of telling the computer about the location of executable files related to *TeX. Therefore, whenever we use *TeX commands, the computer knows where to look for the right files.
- To update the PATH variable, run the following command in the Terminal.
```
  gedit ~/.bashrc
```
  This opens a text editor window. Here we are just editing a text file, and you can use any text editor (I generally use GVim).
Add the following lines to the /.bashrc file.
```
  # TexLive
  export PATH="/usr/local/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH"
  export MANPATH="/usr/bin/local/texlive/2020/texmf-dist/doc/man:$MANPATH"
  export INFOPATH="/usr/bin/local/texlive/2020/texmf-dist/doc/info:$INFOPATH"
```
- Save and close the file, and run the follwoing command in the terminal.
```
  source ~/.bashrc	#Execute ~/.bashrc in the current shell
  hash -r
  which tex
  which xelatex
  which pdflatex
```
The last three commans should print out the path to different programmes which you might use.

Your TexLive installation is complete now.

References

Sea of Tranquility About Archive Feed

Updating TexLive on Ubuntu