TeX Live support for custom binaries

It is possible to install and use TeX Live with binaries that are not part of the original distribution. The most common case for this is when you are on a platform which the original TL distribution does not support.

• Binaries for many platforms are omitted from the DVD to save space, but they are available normally in a network install. (They can also be installed as “custom binaries” in the sense of this page, but we don't provide them as separate tarballs, so it's not especially convenient to do so.)

• Nelson Beebe has built binaries for a large collection of platforms. They are available by http, ftp, and rsync. The parent README there gives details.

• Some of Nelson's binary sets that may be of particular interest: 64-bit CentOS 6, 32-bit CentOS 7, 32-bit CentOS 6, 32-bit CentOS 5. These include all binaries that were possible to build on these platforms; the most likely to be missing are xetex, dvisvgm, biber, asymptote, and luajit. Precise lists for each platform are in Nelson's README.

• 64-bit Windows binaries are not included in TL this year. You can get them as either the natively-compiled binaries from Akira Kakuto (has its own instructions), or the mingw-compiled binaries from Luigi Scarso plus his auxiliary programs (install as a custom binary set).

Using a custom binary set

Given a set of binaries, here are the steps to use it:

1. Acquire the “foreign” binaries and put them (unpacked) in, say, /tmp/foobin:
   mkdir /tmp/foobin && cd /tmp/foobin
   tar xf ...tar.gz
2. Run install-tl --custom-bin=/tmp/foobin.
3. Add TLROOT/bin/custom to PATH. The “/custom” there is literal, and TLROOT is wherever you installed TeX Live, /usr/local/texlive/20yy by default.

Regarding subsequent TL package updates from the net: ensure that you have wget, xz, and xzdec available in your PATH; otherwise, TL will have no way to download or decompress packages. Also, there will be no updates to the platform-specific packages in TL, since the custom platform doesn't exist in the canonical TL repository.

Therefore, you may have to manually adjust symlinks in your custom dir. Symlinks (on Unix) in the binary directories point to scripts that can run on any platform. When and if the target of a symlink changes location for whatever reason, you would need to update the symlink in your own directory.

Using a second custom binary set

If you want to install a second set of custom binaries (from, say, /tmp/barbin), you first have to manually rename the first set, like this:

1. mv TLROOT/bin/custom TLROOT/bin/custom-foo
2. mkdir TLROOT/bin/custom
3. cp /tmp/barbin/* TLROOT/bin/custom
4. Switch your PATH between TLROOT/bin/custom and custom-foo to control which set is current.