How To Install biber on Ubuntu 20.04
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install biber on Ubuntu 20.04.
What is biber
biber is:
The biblatex package by Philipp Lehman is becoming the definitive citation management tool for LaTeX users. Biblatex has relied on the venerable BibTeX program only for sorting and generating a very generic .bbl file without any formatting instruction. Everything else is taken care of by biblatex, which provides a powerful and flexible macro interface for authors of citation styles.
Biber offers a large superset of BibTeX functionality for BibLaTeX users. In addition it offers full UTF-8 (Unicode 6.0) capabilities, fully customisable sorting, output to GraphViz to help visualise complex crossrefs, support for remote data sources, structural validation of the data against the (customisable) data model, and a lot more.
There are three methods to install biber on Ubuntu 20.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install biber Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install biber using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install biber
Install biber Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install biber using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install biber
Install biber Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install biber using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install biber
How To Uninstall biber on Ubuntu 20.04
To uninstall only the biber package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove biber
Uninstall biber And Its Dependencies
To uninstall biber and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 20.04, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove biber
Remove biber Configurations and Data
To remove biber configuration and data from Ubuntu 20.04 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge biber
Remove biber configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove biber configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge biber
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install biber package on Ubuntu 20.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.
