TeXlive2009 binaries for FreeBSD 6,7,8 (i386/AMD64)

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:30:48 +0200, Manolis Kiagias <sonicy at otenet.gr> wrote:
> acheron wrote:
>> I just got the news of someone who build binaries of TeXlive 2009.
>>
>> http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2009-November/023783.html
>
> This is great news, thanks for sharing. I was looking forward to get
> TexLive 2009 running on FreeBSD.

You can build your own binaries by tweaking an svn checkout of the
TeXlive sources.  I've done this on my laptop, because I run CURRENT
and the old TeXlive 2008 binaries failed to run:

    keramida at kobe:/tmp$ tex
    This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009/FreeBSD)
    **\relax

    *\bye
    No pages of output.
    Transcript written on texput.log.
    keramida at kobe:/tmp$

I think I kept notes while building the binaries.  If I manage to find
them soon-ish I will post a followup of how you can build a TeXlive 2009
distribution from source.

Note that the TeXlive sources are more than 1.7 GB of compressed data:

    keramida at kobe:/home/texlive$ ls -la
    total 1793074
    drwxrwxr-x  2 root      wheel  -          4 Oct 26 04:02 .
    drwxr-xr-x  9 root      wheel  -          9 Nov 10 22:35 ..
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 keramida  wheel  -        244 Oct 24 05:10 makeiso.sh
    -rw-rw-r--  1 keramida  wheel  - 1834745550 Oct 23 04:33 tldevsrc.tar.bz2
    keramida at kobe:/home/texlive$

and will expand to at least 2 GB:

    keramida at kobe:/opt/texlive$ du -sh .
    2.1G    .
    keramida at kobe:/opt/texlive$

The FreeBSD binaries themselves are really _very_ small:

    keramida at kobe:/opt/texlive$ du -sh bin/i386-freebsd
     34M    bin/i386-freebsd
    keramida at kobe:/opt/texlive$

But you would have to build TL-2009 on FreeBSD 8.X to be able to use it
in non-CURRENT snapshots.

Notes for builders
==================

If you try building TeXlive 2009 on FreeBSD 8.X it may be useful to set
the following in your shell environment:

    export TL_MAKE='gmake'
    export TL_CONF_BANNER='--with-tex-banner="TeX Live 2009/FreeBSD"'
    export TL_CONFIGURE_ARGS='--without-graphite'

You can get a source snapshot of TeXlive 2009 following the instructions
at <http://www.tug.org/texlive/>.  I used rsync to grab a snapshot of
the sources, as described in <http://www.tug.org/texlive/svn/>.  Then I
followed the instructions at <http://www.tug.org/texlive/build.html> to
build my own snapshot on FreeBSD 9.X.