MiKTeX 2.8 Beta 1 is available! This is a source code release for GNU/Linux.

Please visit the 2.8 status page, if you want to try it out.

What's new

The MiKTeX package manager graphical user interface (GUI) has been ported to GNU/Linux using the Qt widget toolkit.

The GUI allows you to browse the package database and install packages.

What comes next

This is the todo list for the upcoming beta releases:

• MiKTeX-pdfTeX for GNU/Linux:
  The MiKTeX variant of pdfTeX has the MiKTeX package manager
  integrated. This feature makes it possible to install missing packages
  on-the-fly.
• LuaTeX integration

MiKTeX package manager GUI (Linux)

My development progress bar shows sixty percent.

What has been done:

• package information is displayed in a list view window
• it is possible to install/remove packages
  

What is missing:

• search for packages (using file names or keywords
  

The source code will be made available soon.

Coding this initial version was fun. I have learned many new things (Qt, Unix build tools, ...). Not a waste of time. But:

Now that TeX Live has a nice package manager of its own, I do not
expect much interest in the MiKTeX package manager for Linux. That
said, I only will continue to spend time on this project, if more
pledges come in. See http://micropledge.com/projects/miktex-mpm-qt?do=pledge, for more information.

LuaTeX integration

Nothing happened yet. I took a look at the LuaTeX development sources and discovered no stumbling points. On principle, it should be possible to integrate LuaTeX. And I will start this task in October. It remains to be seen whether LuaTeX will be successful. At the moment, only ConTeXt seems to make use of its features.

pdfTeX for Linux

I will make available the MiKTeX version of pdfTeX for Linux.

I have released a new version of MiKTeX Tools for Unix-like operating systems. This is a bug fix release:

• The previous Beta installed files with permissions -rw-------. This has been changed to -rw-r--r--.
• A GCC 3.x.x compilation issue has been fixed in the header file core.h.

I have released a new version of the source package for Unix-like operating systems (read the announcement).

You will notice that the package has been renamed to "MiKTeX Tools". I want to emphasize the fact that the package is not a TeX system/distribution.

I have released the MiKTeX 2.5 Beta 1 source code (see announcement). The package includes the command-line version of the package manager.

This is not a release for Windows operating systems. The source code is meant to be compiled on GNU systems.

MPM (MiKTeX Package Manager) was originally intended to be a tool for MiKTeX/Windows users.  But the program can be helpful for users of other TeX systems too, because many of the MiKTeX packages are system-independent. More...

I have released a snapshot of the current MiKTeX 2.5 source tree:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/miktex/miktex-2.5.2045-snapshot.tar.gz?download

The source tree can be used to build the package manager (MPM) for Un*x systems. The prerequisites are:

• ANSI-compliant C++ compiler (e.g, g++ 3.x)
• CURL libraries

Now that the commandline-version of the package manager is near completion, I wonder how complicated is it to port the Windows (MFC) version to Linux?

I take into consideration these strategies:

1. Reimplement the application in C# (.NET), i.e., port it to Mono.
2. Rewrite the MFC application using one of the free portable GUI toolkits:
   • It seems that wxWidgets (fka wxWindows) would be the right choice, since it resembles the MFC framework.
   • Qt is a well designed toolkit. But it is unclear whether the Windows version of Qt will be released under GPL.
   • GTK+ is released under LGPL and claims to be object oriented, though it is written in C.

I have completed refactoring the MiKTeX core library. The library now compiles on Linux systems.

Next comes the package manager library. Challenges in this area are the following:

• Internet protocols (HTTP, FTP)
• cabinet files

Currently, the library uses Windows APIs to access the Internet and to read cabinet files. In order to make the library portable, I will refactor it to use

• libcurl - a multiprotocol transfer library (http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/)
• libmspack - a library for Microsoft compression formats (http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/libmspack/)

The refactoring will take a month or two. Once completed, we have the command-line version (http://www.miktex.org/manual/mpm.html) of the MiKTeX package manager ready to be run on Linux, i.e., teTeX/TeXLive users will be able to download and install packages from the MiKTeX package repository.