TeX Live 2014 Notes for FreeBSD users

1. Prerequisites[top]

TeX Live 2014 fully supports FreeBSD (i386 and amd64). To install it, you need just Perl. To use its graphical user interface (recommended), you need x11-toolkits/p5-Tk.

• All binaries are compiled to work on every FreeBSD >= 7.1, including 11-CURRENT.
• The following binaries need the basic X.Org and font-related libraries, which should be present on your system if you have any graphical environment: inimf, mf, pdfopen, pdfclose, xdvi and xetex.

From 2009 to 2012 I used to provide full TeX Live support for systems older than 7.1. Please follow the links in the header for more info if you use such a system.

2. FreeBSD-specific changes in 2014[top]

• asy is no longer included since it is not possible to build a portable binary; please use math/asymptote instead;
• the official TeX Live release remains the only way to easily install and use biber (the next-generation Unicode-aware biblatex backend ‒ relies on many newer-than-ported and not-yet-ported Perl modules) and xindy (the next-generation Unicode-aware indexing system).

3. Official TeX Live release vs. FreeBSD TeX Live port[top]

Since 2013, TeX Live is available through FreeBSD ports system. You can choose what suits you better. However, there are several advantages of using the original TeX Live distribution:

• you can maintain multiple versions of TeX Live in parallel;
• you can use xindy and biber, new generation Unicode-aware indexing and bibliography tools; they are not installed through the port;
• you can keep TeX Live installation decoupled from other ports, and thus untouched after major FreeBSD releases;
• you can maintain your TeX packages independently of ports and install updates immediately after they are released;
• at the time of TeX Live 2014 release (14 June 2014), the port lags behind significantly.

4. Technical details[top]

TeX Live 2014 sources (SVN r34194) are built in clean jail(8)s (__FreeBSD_version 702106), with a minimal number of ports installed with their dependencies; these are devel/gmake, x11/libX11, x11-toolkits/libXmu, x11-toolkits/libXaw and x11-fonts/fontconfig. The sources are built using gcc-4.2.1 and clisp-2.49.

5. Feedback[top]

Please report any FreeBSD-related problem with official TeX Live release to texlive@tug.org mailing list and/or to me (especially unpredictable problems that might arise due to the ongoing application of USES=libtool in the ports tree).