The latest version of the setup wizard makes it possible to use delay-expanded environment variables when specifying places for user directories.

For example, consider a shared configuration where all user directories have to be sub-directories of a central directory (say \\server\miktexuser). The user directories can then be specified as follows (in setupwiz.opt):

--shared
--user-config=\\server\miktexuser\<USERNAME>
--user-data=\\server\miktexuser\<USERNAME>
--user-install=\\server\miktexuser\<USERNAME>

The environment variable USERNAME will be expanded at run-time: when user Jane runs a MiKTeX program the directory \\server\miktexuser\Jane is her MiKTeX user directory.

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...

Every once in a while I receive the following request: "Please, make mgs.exe runnable at the DOS-prompt". You should know that mgs.exe is a special version of Ghostscript, meant to be called internally by MiKTeX applications (such as Yap). If you start mgs.exe at the DOS-prompt, the following will happen:

> mgs
MiKTeX GPL Ghostscript 8.15: Can't find initialization file gs_init.ps.

That's because mgs.exe doesn't use the original registry keys and environment variables. For example, mgs.exe queries MIKTEX_GS_LIB instead of GS_LIB. You can start mgs.exe at the DOS-prompt if you set MIKTEX_GS_LIB as follows:

MIKTEX_GS_LIB=C:\texmf\ghostscript\base;C:\texmf\fonts