Major headache today trying to install latex on disasterzone. Firstly, I found that the
tetex package I was used to was no longer supported, so I had to install
texlive instead. It has been a while since I last touched a latex document, and it seems tetex had been out of commission since 2006. After attempting to install texlive, I ran into a bigger problem. The default package for etch was not working. After much debugging, I learned that my problem was similar to the fmtutil bug mentioned in
this bug report and again in
this bug report. Apparently there is a bug where a warning is misinterpreted as a fatal error, stopping apt from installing the package correctly. At the time of this post, the fix for this bug had been accepted but not actually merged into the main repository. As per
these instructions, I added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian oldstable-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
I then installed texlive with the following command via sudo:
apt-get -t oldstable-proposed-updates install texlive texlive-latex-extra
Hopefully the proposed updates get merged into the main repository soon, and other people can avoid dealing this problem.
