[CentOS] TeX Live on CentOS 7

[Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane, JXVS]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nicolas Kovacs [mailto:info at microlinux.fr]
> Sent: Friday, July 21, 2017 2:29 AM
> To: CentOS
> Subject: [CentOS] TeX Live on CentOS 7
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I just installed the OpenVAS vulnerability scanner on my CentOS 7
> workstation. Everything seems to work fine, except PDF generation. The
> 'openvas-check-setup' script tells me that PDF generation works fine,
> but whenever I want to generate a report, the result is unusable and
> can't open in Evince or Okular.
> 
> After googling a bit, I found out that several users complained that Tex
> Live is broken under RHEL/CentOS 7.
> 
> While I did use LaTeX a long time ago to write documents, I don't use it
> anymore nowadays (just Markdown or LibreOffice). But I do need a working
> installation of TeX Live for OpenVAS PDF reports.
> 
> What can I do now? Perform a manual installation of TeX Live with their
> provided installer (to /opt) and then blacklist all texlive* packages? I
> admit I'm a bit surprised that a distribution like RHEL/CentOS that
> prises quality wouldn't provide a working TeX Live in their package
> repositories.
> 
> Any suggestions?

The users that were complaining, were they all OpenVAS user?

Going from my experiences on CentOS 6, I find it surprising that LaTeX is not working.
Does even the trivial.tex from [0] compile?
Can you get the LaTeX file that OpenVAS is generating, and on the command line run pdflatex (or other latex compile command) on it and capture the error messages?
This might point to missing packages/fonts.

It may be possible that not enough of texlive has been installed.   I tend to do a `yum install \*latex\*` (and answer no) to see what is available and then install every latex thing that is not a -devel package. That way I never have to think about getting packages again, or if I do I will pretty much know I'll have to get it from CTAN myself.
seeing [1] from the opanvas wiki makes me think you should try `yum install \*latex\*extra\*` and see if it is now available.  And as seen elsewhere [2] sometimes rpm packager's don't name them the same as LaTeX packagers.   And it looks like[3] a lot of folks take the same 'trash the distro' perspective as openvas[1] which is unfortunate.  Perhaps we could ask the CentOS-extras (and a RHEL or EPEL ticket) folks if they would be willing to rebuild the needed packages from an old Fedora RPM if they are not yet available in a EL repository.  Have you checked EPEL?


[0] https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=48421
[1] https://wiki.openvas.org/index.php/Generate_a_PDF_report#CentOS_7
[2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/166140
[3] https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=54410

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