Re: (Solved) TeXLive and dist-upgrades of Debian Stable

I am discovering how less I know of Linux file structure and operations. Thanks to one and all who have helped me so far. 

> Hello,
> when you run these programs with sudo, the environment of the root user is used.
> You can check that with
> sudo which tlmgr
> The simplest workaround might be to call tlmgr with the full path or setup root's path properly.
> But that is already far outside the TL area and should be discussed in a linux support group.
> Good luck
> Alois

sudo which tlmgr
/usr/bin/tlmgr
~$ which tlmgr
/usr/local/texlive/2025/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr


> the documenttion says that you should install TeX Live as a normal
> user and thus use tlmgr as a user (without sudo). If you did not
> follow this advice, you must set PATH for root as well. 

I remember reading in the documentation Sec. 3.2.3 "Installation/Running the installer/Directories" that we need write permissions for the installation directory. And that's exactly what is showing up as an error.

~$ tlmgr update --all
tlmgr: package repository https://2.mirrors.in.sahilister.net/ctan/systems/texlive/tlnet (verified)
You don't have permission to change the installation in any way,
specifically, the directory /usr/local/texlive/2025/tlpkg/ is not writable.
Please run this program as administrator, or contact your local admin.
tlmgr: An error has occurred. See above messages. Exiting.


> If you installed as root and want to change it so that you can use tlmgr
> without sudo, you can (of caourse with sudo) recursively change
> ownership of all files and directories to you.
> 
> Zdeněk Wagner

So I see that /usr/local/texlive/2025 should be writable. One way to do it was to change the ownership of this directory (recursively) to my username.

sudo chown -R vrgovinda:vrgovinda /usr/local/texlive/2025/

Now everything works fine. I preferred not to use tlmgr with sudo. So I took Zdeněk Wagner's advice.

Thanks again.