Re: TeX Live or MikTeX for computer lab installation?

On 2007-10-10, Peter Flynn wrote:
Alan Munn wrote:
We have a computer lab for students to use which is administered by our
university computer people. They're very happy to put software on the
lab servers when we request it. Recently there has been more interest
among the students about using LaTeX, but the three of us in the
department who use it all use Macs. I have no problems advising the
computer folk on how to get MacTeX up and running in the lab, but I'm
not so clear on the PC side of things.

So the question I have is, for a PC based distribution, which would be a
better choice for a server based lab situation, MikTeX or TeX Live?

ProTeXt, which is built on MiKTeX and distributed in the TeX Collection.

Criteria would be, ease of installation, ease of updating, suitability
to a server situation etc.

The last criterion is the tough one.

I know that MikTeX automatically loads uninstalled packages. How would
this work on a server situation? Are there things that I would need to
know to tell the installers how to configure either distribution so that
it would work seamlessly under a lab situation?

I have tried and failed to create a working installation for locked-down
lab PCs running Windows. The restriction is that a user cannot write to
*anything* except their USB stick: all hard disks and shares are RO.

What I wanted to do was put the texmf trees on the C or D drive -- or
even on one of the shares -- and configure it to accept the localtexmf
tree on a USB stick. But because there are multiple sockets, and a
student could have multiple sticks or other devices, it becomes
impossible to predict what drive letter they will acquire when plugged
in. We could try to enforce a rule that if you use TeX, your stick must
go in the top socket, but there are other devices that a machine might
acquire over the academic year which might change the disk letter
assignment even for a fixed socket.

Just some comments:

1) There is nothing stopping you from defining many local texmf trees
- one for each of the possible drive letters for the USB stick.
2) Since the FNDB is stored in the profile, the students can update
the FNDB themselves if they happen to put the stick in another drive
than the usual one.
3) I would install MiKTeX on a local drive, not network share, if possible.
But that isn't TeX specific.

The other requirement was that MiKTeX's ability to recognise missing
packages and install them would mean writing them to the user's stick,
which would mean each user would need to maintain those packages
personally. This can be overcome by installing pretty much everything
anyway (and disk space is not a problem usually).

4) Yes, I think the best is to avoid tricking MiKTeX to install on the
USB stick. Then you would also have to make it update the packages on
the stick and possibly remove them if you decide to include it in the
base install - messy. You could trick the automagical installer to
send a message to the sysadmin when some packages are missing. Are
just disable it completely and make the students file a feature
request like they do for other software with missing plugin X.

Hans

--
The UK (La)TeX FAQ - http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
The Not So Short ... - http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/lshort/lshort.pdf
TeX at ODP - http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Typesetting/TeX/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: can tetex and texlive coexist at the same time on the same linux-pc?
    ... virtual machines are a very robust way to support tetex and texlive. ... The VMware player is easy to install and there are a number of prepackaged runtimes for various linux versions. ... At work I have TL2005 with multiple binaries on a server, so I just mount the partion with TL2005 in a VM, set the PATH, and go. ... In general, it should only be necessary to change the PATH variable to switch between the tex system that runs from /usr/bin and an alternative that keeps the binaries in a separate location. ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: TeX Live or MikTeX for computer lab installation?
    ... computer folk on how to get MacTeX up and running in the lab, ... better choice for a server based lab situation, ... ProTeXt, which is built on MiKTeX and distributed in the TeX Collection. ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 Active Directory Upgrade
    ... this is an after hours install. ... the lab is almost never identical to the production env. ... installation of the service pack. ... servers and if not done make the second also DNS server. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory)
  • Re: TeX Live or MikTeX for computer lab installation?
    ... I have no problems advising the computer folk on how to get MacTeX up and running in the lab, but I'm not so clear on the PC side of things. ... So the question I have is, for a PC based distribution, which would be a better choice for a server based lab situation, MikTeX or TeX Live? ... We could try to enforce a rule that if you use TeX, your stick must go in the top socket, but there are other devices that a machine might acquire over the academic year which might change the disk letter assignment even for a fixed socket. ... The other requirement was that MiKTeX's ability to recognise missing packages and install them would mean writing them to the user's stick, which would mean each user would need to maintain those packages personally. ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • RE: W2k3 to W2k8 upgrade, clean SCCM 2007 installation
    ... it's a lab, might as well try SQL 08. ... My reasoning for Server 08: you will likely want to upgrade it to Server 08 ... "Bob" wrote: ... would you install it on Server 2003 instead of Server 2008? ...
    (microsoft.public.sms.setup)