tlmgr TexLive 2013 in Ubuntu 14.4

Question

I am new so I hope that I'm asking in the right way.

I have the following problem: On my Ubuntu 14.4 machine I installed texlive from the official repositories. This is the list of all installed packages containing "tex":

luatex                      install
preview-latex-style             install
tex-common                  install
texlive-base                    install
texlive-bibtex-extra                install
texlive-binaries                install
texlive-extra-utils             install
texlive-font-utils              install
texlive-generic-recommended         install
texlive-lang-english                install
texlive-lang-german             install
texlive-latex-base              install
texlive-latex-base-doc              install
texlive-latex-extra             install
texlive-latex-extra-doc             install
texlive-latex-recommended           install
texlive-latex-recommended-doc           install
texlive-latex3                  install
texlive-luatex                  install
texlive-pictures                install
texlive-pictures-doc                install
texlive-pstricks                install
texlive-pstricks-doc                install'

Now I encountered an error about missing a font and as described here I wanted to install the missing package(s) using tlmgr. Unfortunately, the texlive repository thinks my install outdated:

anjuta@x:~$ tlmgr install ec
(running on Debian, switching to user mode!)
tlmgr: The TeX Live versions supported by the repository
http://ftp.fau.de/ctan/systems/texlive/tlnet (2014--2014)
do not include the version of the local installation (2013).'

Is this my true problem? Do I have to install texlive 2014 manually? How is it possible that in a brandnew OS's repositories packages are outdated to the extend that they're not supported anymore?

I hope you can help me with this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you wish to continue using TeXLive 2013, change your repository:

tlmgr option repository ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2013/tlnet-final

You can also easily update to TeXLive 2014 and install again all the packages you had in TeXLive2013.

How is it possible that in a brandnew OS's repositories packages are outdated to the extend that they're not supported anymore?

TexLive 2014 was released in June (so it could not be included in Ubuntu 14.04 in April). TexLive 2013 is no longer supported from July 2014 (and it seems all CTAN mirrors follow this deprecation, except for the tug.org/historic).