elh@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU (Edward L. Hepler) (06/17/88)
Since there seems to be renewed interest in TeX/LaTeX for the UNIX/PC and 3b1 I thought that I would repost this... I have hesitated from reposting because copying all the disks people sent me the last time took a lot of time... Since the last distribution, I have made a couple of minor modifications to the previewer and recompiled it using the shared library... Other than that, it is the same... Here is the original posting (from last year) with corrections/additions marked in []. ----------- I have finally determined the distribution stategy for the port of TeX/LaTeX/Previewer that I did for the UNIX/PC. Thanks to all of you who made suggestions. After reading all the comments that were sent in and consulting with the system manager of the machine where I receive mail (vu-vlsi), I decided to go the floppy disk route and try to use the same mechanism that Brant Cheikes is using for the Gnu Emacs distribution. Almost all that is to be distributed is available elsewhere. Much of what is there I got off the net or from other "ftp-able" places. What I have done is port them to the UNIX/PC and in the case of the previewer rewrite the dvibit driver to work on the UNIX/PC (and Sun!). Included on the floppies are: 1. The source for Common TeX 2. The source for Nelson Beebe's dvi drivers 3. The necessary macros to make TeX/LaTeX work 4. About a half dozen magnifications of the computer modern fonts 5. Source for tgrind, s2latex, and tr2tex 5. Executables for tex, latex, previewer, tgrind, s2latex, tr2latex The porting process was accomplished on my UNIX/PC which is using the 3.5 release of the OS and the 3.51 release of the utilities. I have only run these programs on a 2 Meg (RAM) system. I have no way of knowing how they might work on other configurations of RAM or OS. Everything is compressed and cpio'd onto 12 floppies. You should be able to use the install utility to pull things off the disks and uncompress the files. Uncompressed, the files take about 7 Meg (I have pared things down since the initial announcement and also misinterpreted the results of du (I work on a Sun during the day where du gives results in 1k blocks...)). If you use the script, you will need about twice that (14 Meg) since I use cpio -p... to move the data to the correct directory. [Last sentence not correct; I us the -pl option.] If you can't spare that much space to do the install, you can manually install the stuff directly in /usr/local. Installation takes about 30-45 minutes. Most of the time is spent uncompressing things. [Uncompress is included on the disk] I place everything under the directory /usr/local. If that creates heartburn for you, you will have to manually install the stuff and recompile some of the programs (which look to /usr/local/lib/tex... for info). Some of the programs allow an environment variable to be set (I think!) to provide alternate paths for the library. I haven't used that feature.... You will have to put /usr/local/bin in your path. Like Brant [with EMACS], I am distributing the TeX/LaTeX stuff on floppies only; no uucp transfers will be provided. The files are huge and I cannot afford to have my one data line tied up for long periods. If anyone else wants to provide uucp access to these distributions, that's fine by me. I would request that any changes, enhancements, etc. be channelled back through me so that we can keep track of revisions... You can probably get by with much less disk space after you get the system up. Some of you may want to delete some of the font magnifications and the source, etc. GETTING THE DISTRIBUTION In order to get the distribution from me, please do the following: 1. Write a note specifying: a) your US Mail address (where you want the disks sent back to) b) your electronic mail address. Please make sure you give me a route from a registered site (preferably a backbone). 2. You will have to send me 12 DSDD diskettes (with hub rings and labels) for me to put the distribution on. Please format the disks using the standard floppy disk formatting utility (for the 7300). [Only 10 floppies are needed if you format the disks at 10 sectors/track.] 3. Make out a check to me (Edward Hepler) in the amount of $20. This is [a donation] just to cover my distribution and administration costs. [Like return postage, etc.] 4. Package all this up together in a sturdy (reusable) mailer and mail it to: Ed Hepler 794 Bass Cove Malvern, Pa. 19355 5. After you've mailed the package, please send me e-mail so that I'll be on the lookout for it. (to elh@vu-vlsi) When I mail the diskettes back to you, I'll notify you by e-mail so you can watch out for them. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by e-mail. -- Ed Hepler UUCP: elh@vu-vlsi