sudo ./install-tl-ubuntu [OPTIONS]

I recommend using git clone but I've learned that many Github users don't have Git. In these cases, you can download directly as follows:

wget https://github.com/scottkosty/install-tl-ubuntu/raw/master/install-tl-ubuntu && chmod  x ./install-tl-ubuntu

• installs the latest version of TeX Live
  • automatically finds the fastest repository
  • gives updated progress of the install
  • restarts automatically if install fails
• tlmgr can then be used to keep your install up-to-date
• notifies apt so that apt does not try to install the Ubuntu texlive-* packages as dependencies (e.g. if you do sudo apt-get install lyx)
• links to the folder where Ubuntu installs TeX files so that when you install Ubuntu packages (e.g. FoilTeX and noweb) with LaTeX files, they will be available
• adds TeX Live fonts to be used system-wide
• other font-related conveniences
  • tells AppArmor to allow Evince to access the TeX Live fonts
  • can install TrueType fonts that user provides (--truetype-dir)
  • can install culmus Hebrew fonts (--hebrew)
• optionally installs additional LaTeX files for common journals that are not included in TeX Live (--more-tex)
• works non-interactively and thus can be added to a batch install script
• tlmgr can be run from the desktop menu (if 'gksu' package is installed)
• install can be done from an ISO file (--iso)
• optionally installs TeX Live pretest instead, when it is available (--pretest)

For more details, see

./install-tl-ubuntu --help

This script uses the TeX Live installer to install TeX Live so that LaTeX packages can be updated through CTAN with tlmgr. To do this, the official TeX Live installer is downloaded and used and apt is informed that TeX dependencies are satisfied. Thus, when you want to install a program with apt-get that depends on TeX Live, apt will not try to install the TeX Live packages from the Ubuntu repositories.

This script automates many of the instructions that were posted in the 25 Jan 2013 answer by Silex here. TeX Live installation documentation can be found in the Quick install and the The TeX Live Guide. Information on TeX Live's install script arguments is here. The Net::LWP Perl module (Ubuntu package libwww-perl) is recommended, but not necessary. See the "persistent-downloads" section of the install-tl documenation.

Progress and profiling are logged to STDOUT. Important errors are logged to STDERR. Annoying STDOUT and STDERR messages are redirected to a file descriptor (which is connected to the file install-tl-ubuntu_EXTRAS.log by default) in case they are useful for debugging.

Ubuntu versions 12.04 and later are supported.