Easy installation/removal of a LaTeX package

I used to use LaTeX in Windows and there was Miktex Package Manager with which it was very easy to add a missing package. I wanted to install textcomp to Ubuntu 11.10 and it requires me to download the zip from here and find the packages which are in /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex in my case, extract the zip contents to there, and update the packages.

Is there a package manager which does installation and removal in an easier way like the Miktex Package Manager in Windows?

Solution 1:

I advise to recur to an installation by hand of a tex package only when such tex package is not available in an ubuntu package.

Searching for it with

apt-file -x search '/textcomp.sty$'

I obtain the following results:

texlive-latex-base: /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/textcomp.sty

and it say the tex package you look for is contained in the ubuntu package whose name is texlive-latex-base, so install it, if not already installed.

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base

By the way, apt-file is a command to install separately contained in the apt-file package, and only a convenient and alternative way to search into the repositories the same way as http://packages.ubuntu.com/.