The TeX Live net installer is a great tool. However, with a slow Internet connection it may be daunting. Think of multiple installations in a company, or imagine several users at a TeX conference or another meeting would like to install TeX Live concurrently using the meeting's internet connection.
Possible solutions would be distributing DVDs or USB sticks with a possibly slightly outdated version, using a cache such as a proxy server, or setting up a local mirror repository. Now there's another way.
Possible solutions would be distributing DVDs or USB sticks with a possibly slightly outdated version, using a cache such as a proxy server, or setting up a local mirror repository. Now there's another way.
Lars Madsen announced the availability of w32transplant on the TeX Live mailing list. This tool can be used to transplant a TeX Live installation from a donor PC to another PC. So you can save time, bandwidth, and costs. You even can do unattended installations on a bunch of PCs, it's not much more than unzipping and running a batch file.
The tool is already usable, though in a testing stage.
A possible workflow may be:
- Install TeX Live on one PC, using the newest installer
- Add all packages, tools and fonts you might need, do all adjustments which should be transferred too
- Check the TeX Live tree for not needed data which would waste space also in the copies
- Download and unzip w32transplant.zip and add w32transplant, w32transplant.bat and the w32transplant_support folder to the TeX Live tree (such as c:\texlive\2012)
- Zip the whole TeX Live tree (using 7zip, WinZip, or another archiver)
- On each other client PC, copy and unzip that file to the same place and run w32transplant.bat
- Remove the copied zip file from the client PC(s)
A detailed description and the tool for downloading can be found at the w32transplant site.
