Learn how to install beamer on your operating system (Windows, Linux or Mac) and start creating beautiful LaTeX presentations.

To create presentations in LaTeX, the user needs to install the latest version of Beamer, PGF, and xcolor packages. Let’s start by the first operating system!

1. Installing Beamer on Windows

– TeXLive

If you have already installed the latest version of TeXLive under full installation mode, then the beamer class is included by default. For older TeXLive versions, the tlmgr tool can be used to install the missing beamer, pgf and xcolor packages.

– MikTeX

To use the beamer class in MikTeX, the user needs to install the three packages using the package manager in MikTeX Console. The next illustration shows how one can install beamer package on Windows using MikteX Console. Similarly, PGF and Xcolor packages can be installed.

Beamer Installation Windows MikTeX
Beamer Installation on Windows: Package Manager in MikTeX Console
Refresh database Beamer installation
Refreshing Filename Database (FNDB)

2. Installing Beamer on Linux

Installing the beamer class in Ubuntu is reasonably straightforward. Run the command aptitude install latex-beamer. If the packages do not exist by default, then the automatic installation of the required packages will start. The following packages will get lodged in the local directory: latex-beamer, pgf, and xcolor.

3. Installing Beamer on Mac

To run the beamer class in MacTeX, we need to have UMBC themes. However, LaTeX doesn’t ship these things along with it, and the user needs to download and install them separately. The process of installation as described by the
read.me file:

  1. UMBC theme collection can be downloaded from beamer-umbc.tar.gz
  2. Unzip the archive file. This will yield a folder named beamer. The user needs to rename this folder as UMBC.
  3. Next, choose to Go to Folder under the menu choice and type ∼/Library.
  4. The user will see a folder with the name ’texmf’ if it already exists. If nothing appears, create a folder with ’texmf’ name.
  5. Inside the texmf folder, the user shall find a tex folder (if it already exists) or create a new one.
  6. Now, inside the tex folder, another folder named latex should exist, open it ( if it does not exist, create it.)
  7. Finally, place the UMBC folder inside the latex folder.
  8. Run texhash to let TeX read the newly installed files.
Beamer installation on MAC Os

Now, we should be able to use the beamer class in MacTeX.

4. Test Your Installation

The first thing that we should do before starting creating LaTeX presentations is to test the installation. To this end, download one of the following generic talks:

and place it in your presentation folder. It should be noted that these files can be found in the following path beamer/doc/solutions/generic-talks. The next step is to run the command pdflatex and check whether the output pdf file looks like the following: