How To: Install TexLive and Xetex on Gentoo

This is mostly for me, but hopefully others might find it useful someday. TeXLive is a huge LaTeX distribution, one that far exceeds TeTeX, and it comes with XeTeX pre-installed.

I recently "upgraded" my TeTex/XeTeX system only to find that my rough typeset edition of Aimee wouldn't compile. Wondering what I was doing wrong, I ran the build against Sterlings, which is what produced the book, only to find that it wouldn't compile either! And then I tried to back out my upgrade, only to discover that the previous edition had been removed from the ports system because it was "unuseable." Arrggh! It worked for me.

Repeat after me: "Gentoo is for the developers, not for the users."

Anyway, I decided to install TeXLive, because it promised to have a complete and working XeTeX toolchain. Well, and so. But TeXLive is considered "unstable" (in Debian terms), and so you needed a whole raft of modifications. But TeXLive is being "modularized" the way X was recently modularized, and the dependency Hell is really, really annoying. In case anyone else wants to follow me down this rose-and-thorn laden path, here are the modifications you need: ( Kinda big. )

"Your Friends-Only Post Has Been Stolen."

If you get an instant message with this message: Your Friends-Only post has been stolen, and a URL, DO NOT OPEN IT. You will get bombed with an uncloseable page with audio, video, and a background of some of the most vile and disgusting images you could possibly imagine. The embedded text and keywords are full of racist epithets. I imagine if you're on a windows box the page might be full of probes at the weakness of your security.

If you're a professional, you might consider probing the page with wget to see what it all does, but really, you don't need to.