How to install LaTeX

Windows

Cygwin

Using Cygwin has the major advantage that it provides a Unix like environment which the Rockbox build environment assumes to be present. Building the manual on Windows natively should be possible but hasn't been tested.

Distribution	Advantages	Disadvantages
teTeX	Distributed with Cygwin	Needs additional packages installed, not maintained anymore, outdated, htlatex (HTML manual) not available, no package manager
TeXLive	PDF and HTML works, actively maintained	no installation of missing packages on the fly
MiKTeX	Nice installer, installation of packages on the fly	htlatex not working from Cygwin (for me, package available)

teTeX

The teTeX distribution is outdated (not maintained anymore since several years, see teTeX homepage), please consider using TeXLive (recommended by the teTeX mainainer).

In case you still want to use teTeX: teTeX and teTeX-extras are available as Cygwin packages. You need to install the inputenx package separately:

# put it into the oberdiek folder, that should be present (global installation)
cd /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/oberdiek/
# get the package file
wget http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/oberdiek/inputenx.dtx
# extract it
tex inputenx.dtx
# we don't need the file anymore
rm inputenx.dtx
# rebuild LaTeX' ls-R database
mktexlsr

TeXLive

To install TeXLive for building the manual do the following:

• Install Cygwin with at least the following packages: make, gcc (or gcc4), subversion, perl, wget
• Make sure you don't have teTeX installed. If you previously installed it with Cygwin uninstall it first.
• install TeXLive (medium scheme) using the non-Windows installer install-tl-unx.tar.gz according to the TeXLive website (from Cygwin prompt). If you don't want to change your PATH variable (see below) enable the "create symlinks to standard directories" option in the installer. You can keep the default /usr/local/bin for that since it's in the search path on Cygwin by default. You also might want to pass the installer a mirror to use (the default one was pretty slow for me).
• If you didn't let the installer create symlinks make sure TeXLive is in PATH: export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2010/bin/i386-cygwin:$PATH.
• TeXLive has a package manager tlmgr that can be used to install missing packages. Usually the package has the same name as the .sty file. You need to install additional packages by calling tlmgr from the Cygwin prompt:
  • tlmgr install soul tex4ht enumitem multirow tex4ht.i386-cygwin

MiKTeX

MiKTeX is a native Windows distribution and comes with a nice installer. It also supports installing missing packages on the fly with a graphical confirmation dialog. To use MiKTeX in combination with Cygwin:

• Install MiKTeX (the basic version is sufficient)
• Install Cygwin but without any LaTeX packages (teTeX packages)
• Open the Cygwin shell and extend the PATH variable by the path to the MiKTeX bin folder. In my case this looks like the following:
  export PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/MiKTeX\ 2.9/miktex/bin/:$PATH. This might not be necessary if the MiKTeX installer extended the Windows path.

Native

Building the manual natively on Windows hasn't been tested. If you have any experience please update this section.

VMWare

The VMWare image is missing only the Unicode support package. Log in as root and run "apt-get install latex-ucs" to install it

Linux

LaTeX should be available as packages on all common Linux distributions. Recent distributions have support for unicode. If you use an older distribution you might need to install unicode support manually. You need to have unicode support for LaTeX to build the manual.

Arch

# pacman -S texlive-core texlive-latexextra texlive-htmlxml

Debian / Ubuntu

If you are running a recent Debian, Ubuntu or another Debian-based Linux:

# apt-get install texlive-latex-base texlive-binaries texlive-latex-extra texlive-plain-generic texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-latex-recommended lmodern

• "texlive-latex-extra" now also contains the previous "latex-ucs" package.
• "texlive-latex-recommended" now also contains the previous "latex-xcolor" package.
• "texlive-plain-generic" contains the previous "tex4ht" package.

If you are running an older Debian, Ubuntu or another Debian-based Linux:

# apt-get install tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-extra latex-ucs tex4ht

Fedora

Install texlive and texlive-multiline. For building the HTML manual additionally install tetex-tex4ht.

Gentoo

# emerge tetex latex-unicode

Mac OS X

MacTeX

Just install the MacTeX distribution. More information about TeX and LaTeX on OS X is here.