TeX Live On CentOS 7

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Hi,

I just installed the OpenVAS vulnerability scanner on my CentOS 7
workstation. Everything seems to work fine, except PDF generation. The
‘openvas-check-setup’ script tells me that PDF generation works fine, but whenever I want to generate a report, the result is unusable and can’t open in Evince or Okular.

After googling a bit, I found out that several users complained that Tex Live is broken under RHEL/CentOS 7.

While I did use LaTeX a long time ago to write documents, I don’t use it anymore nowadays (just Markdown or LibreOffice). But I do need a working installation of TeX Live for OpenVAS PDF reports.

What can I do now? Perform a manual installation of TeX Live with their provided installer (to /opt) and then blacklist all texlive* packages? I
admit I’m a bit surprised that a distribution like RHEL/CentOS that prises quality wouldn’t provide a working TeX Live in their package repositories.

Any suggestions?

Niki

Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Web : http://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

6 thoughts on - TeX Live On CentOS 7

  • The users that were complaining, were they all OpenVAS user?

    Going from my experiences on CentOS 6, I find it surprising that LaTeX is not working. Does even the trivial.tex from [0] compile?
    Can you get the LaTeX file that OpenVAS is generating, and on the command line run pdflatex (or other latex compile command) on it and capture the error messages?
    This might point to missing packages/fonts.

    It may be possible that not enough of texlive has been installed. I tend to do a `yum install \*latex\*` (and answer no) to see what is available and then install every latex thing that is not a -devel package. That way I never have to think about getting packages again, or if I do I will pretty much know I’ll have to get it from CTAN myself. seeing [1] from the opanvas wiki makes me think you should try `yum install \*latex\*extra\*` and see if it is now available. And as seen elsewhere [2] sometimes rpm packager’s don’t name them the same as LaTeX packagers. And it looks like[3] a lot of folks take the same ‘trash the distro’ perspective as openvas[1] which is unfortunate. Perhaps we could ask the CentOS-extras (and a RHEL or EPEL ticket) folks if they would be willing to rebuild the needed packages from an old Fedora RPM if they are not yet available in a EL repository. Have you checked EPEL?

    [0] https://www.CentOS.org/forums/viewtopic.php?tH421
    [1] https://wiki.openvas.org/index.php/Generate_a_PDF_report#CentOS_7
    [2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/166140
    [3] https://www.CentOS.org/forums/viewtopic.php?tT410

  • I always install official TeXLive in /usr/local/texlive – yum update thanks me. Every few months I update it, but keeping it outside of RPM
    means I don’t get tons of individual packages, many that I never use, constantly updating in yum.

  • Le 21/07/2017 à 20:46, Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane, JXVS a écrit :

    Thanks very much for your detailed answer. I’ll look into it tomorrow and see if this solves the problem.

    Cheers from France,

    Niki


    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Web : http://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

  • Le 21/07/2017 à 23:14, Alice Wonder a écrit :

    And how do you manage conflicts with packages? Do you blacklist them in Yum’s repo configuration? And how about the stuff dependending on them?
    Install it manually using –nodeps?

    Niki


    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Web : http://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

  • There aren’t any conflicts. I did make the following file:

    # /etc/profile.d/texlive.sh
    #if [ ${UID} -gt 1000 ]; then export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH
    #fi

    If a package on my system wants a CentOS texlive as dependency it gets it, there are texlive packages installed.

    But users get the texlive in /usr/local/texlive

    The directory /usr/local/texlive is owned by a user:group texlive:texlive and I log in as that user to run tlmgr to update the install.


    -=-
    Sent my from my laptop, may not be able to respond timely

  • That’s not how the RPM dependency system works.

    Unless you’ve got a package that *provides* either the package name or path, RPM has no idea about it. It doesn’t go out and look to see if there are executables in the $PATH of the user installing the software.


    Jonathan Billings