fresh installation of PGF/TikZ crashes, why?

Question

I have a clean CentOS 5.5 machine with tetex installed. Next, I installed PGF/TikZ:

wget http://media.texample.net/pgf/builds/pgfCVS2010-06-02_TDS.zip
unzip pgfCVS2010-06-02_TDS.zip
\cp -r tex /usr/share/texmf
texhash

This is my document:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
test
\end{document}

I'm trying to compile it and this is what I'm getting:

$ latex test.tex
This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4)
entering extended mode
(./test.tex
LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
.. skipped ..
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/pgf/frontendlayer/tikz.sty
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/pgf/pgf.sty
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/graphics/graphicx.sty
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/graphics/graphics.sty
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/graphics/trig.sty)
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/graphics/graphics.cfg))))
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/pgf/utilities/pgffor.sty
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/pgf/utilities/pgfrcs.sty
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/utilities/pgfutil-common.tex)
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/utilities/pgfutil-latex.def)
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/utilities/pgfrcs.code.tex))
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/pgf/utilities/pgfkeys.sty
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/utilities/pgfkeys.code.tex
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/utilities/pgfkeysfiltered.code.tex)))
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/utilities/pgffor.code.tex))
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/frontendlayer/tikz/tikz.code.tex
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/pgf/libraries/pgflibraryplothandlers.code.tex
! Undefined control sequence.
\pgfsetplottension ...ttension {\pgf@sys@tonumber 
                                                  \pgf@x }
l.104 \pgfsetplottension{0.5}

? 

I failed to find any clues in the net about this problem. On other servers I don't such a problem. Could anyone help please? Thanks!

ps. Btw, I tried another build of PGF/TikZ, the older one, no luck :(

Answer 1

Don't use Tetex, it has been unmaintained for many years and has lots of issues; instead use an up-to-date packaging of pdftex, such as Texlive 2009.

Your problem is that .../pgf/libraries/pgflibraryplothandlers.code.tex calls \pgf@sys@tonumber, which is defined in .../pgf/systemlayer/pgfsys.code.tex, but evidently hasn't been bound. The Tex code in .../pgf/systemlayer is where PGF figures out how it is going to talk to the PDF/Postcript plumbing and implementation-dependent specials. If you are using a version of pdftex that does not behave as the PGF code expects, then this is just the kind of problem you should expect.

The version of pdftex you are using is old, whilst your PGF is bang up-to-date: PGF is not very old, so I think your installation is ancient history from the point of view of the PGF codebase. If you upgrade, I expect that your trouble will vanish.