Ubuntu – How to install the latest TeX Live 2012

I believe you need to install a dummy package to fool the system into believing the distribution's Tex system is installed, one of the best instructions I have seen to do this is here: http://blogs.ethz.ch/ubuntu/2011/03/14/tex-live-2010-installation/ , it is for Texlive 2010 but just make the modifications to suite your version and platform and it will work.

It essentially means using the equivs package to build the dummy package, for you to install, you still need to install tex-common texinfo and lmodern, perl-tk` is used by the Texlive update system GUI Implementation so if you want to run tlmgr with a Gui you should install it.

The problem with installing texlive 2012 on Ubuntu Precise 12.04 is that if things go wrong there isn't a whole lot of information out there on how to adequately uninstall it. I think it's important to explicitly say uninstall to improve the search results of others. I finally came across a solution which worked for me with the help of LaTeX Users Group on Google Groups.

Link to LaTeX Users Group

sudo apt-get remove texlive*
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get check

sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/texlive*.postrm
sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/texlive*.list

sudo dpkg --purge --force-all texlive*
sudo dpkg --purge --force-all tex-common*

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base
sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra
sudo apt-get install texlive-full

This all assumes that you've added Backports repositories as described here