[wplug] LaTeX?

[Brandon Kuczenski]

> Sometime in January Brandon Kuczenski assaulted the keyboard and produced:

How do you get it to do that?  I'm assuming you don't type it in manually 
every time...

> 
> | I thought I would do what probably millions of other people have done - 
> | install LaTeX and use it for all my document-preparing needs.
> | 
> | So why the hell is it so hard?  The only Linux-friendly distributions of
> | LaTeX I can find are ftp archives with zero documentation (e.g.  
> | ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/ ) Whatever happened to
> | tar-balls and readme files? 
> 
> most distros come with latex (redhat, debian, suse, etc.)
> 
> | So I'll ask you guys: Where/how do I get LaTeX? I've already installed a
> | TeX implementation (teTeX) and I'm actually a little uncertain exactly
> | what LaTeX gets me beyond that, nor have I found any concise answers.  
> | For such a widely-used program, the documentation is simply awful.
> 
> i'm under the impression that latex comes with teTeX, but i could be
> smoking crack.
> 
> what distro are you using, and what do you have against using that distros
> prepackaged stuff?
> 

I'm using Redhat 9.0.  The reasons are twofold:
1), it didn't occur to me to check, and
2), those people from whom I've learned what little I know about linux 
have lernd me to be extremely skeptical of Redhat.  (I pretty much do 
everything from the Command Line, using X11 only to open terminal 
windows, watch DVDs, and use the non-ascii version of emacs.)
But I'll try that next.  Of course, Redhat probably will not recognize the 
TeX source tree because it *wasn't* installed from RPM..

How do I determine if LaTeX comes with teTeX?  Isn't LaTeX just a library 
of macros that sits ontop of TeX?  

[[Anyway, as of about a week ago, my laptop won't come out of sleep
anymore, so it seems that I suddenly have more substantial problems to
deal with.  Time to do the homework assignment in WordPad. :-( ]]

-brandon