Thursday, November 13, 2008

teTex -> TeXlive transition on Fedora 9

Practically every document I have written professionally since 1994 uses LaTeX, either old vanilla latex (tex -> dvi -> ps) or pdflatex (tex -> pdf), often with non-standard cls files (aastex.cls, mn2e.cls).

Ever since I noticed that Fedora 9 was replacing teTeX with TeXlive I've been dreading the transition, and have kept all my work machines on Fedora 8 rather than transition to Fedora 9. (The KDE4 transition also gave me additional reason to wait until the bugs are fixed.)

I finally got time yesterday to back-up all my papers from work to my home Fedora 9 test machine, and just for fun tried running the TeXlive versions of latex and pdflatex on some of my papers and proposals... and they all worked first time, no messing about or reinstalling of the astro cls files required.

My old cls files that were installed in the /usr/share/texmf tree had not been messed with, and the ls-R file had been automatically updated to include them.

I'm pleasantly surprised, given the prevalence of problems a "texlive tetex" google search reveals. Good job Fedora team!

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