[wplug] LaTeX?

[John Harrold]

Sometime in January Brandon Kuczenski assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| Okay, so here's the deal.  1 -
| 
| Hold on. 0 - My laptop wakes up from sleep normally now. (rebuilt the
| kernel with a special "CONFIG_wake_thinkpad_from_sleep" setting)

that's good.
  
| 1 - I have latex (it came with teTeX), and I installed ghostscript and 
| gsview and they work, after a substantial bit of sleuthing to get gs to 
| compile. (gsview was an rpm).  I can latex and then dvips. BUT...

ghostscript is an rpm: ghostscript-7.05-32.1 with redhat 9.
  
| 2 - It's incomplete (Document page 12, pdf page 26 of the "LaTeX Primer" 
| lists a whole bunch of packages that are supposed to be there and aren't.  
| it also chastizes me as a lazy sysop because I didn't create a file called 
| local.tex, but doesn't say how I should go about doing that)

these books assume that the sysop has a greater understanding of latex
than:

latex fname.tex && dvips  -G0 -f fname.dvi >fname.ps 

i had a friend who installed tetex on solaris a while ago (~98). it seemed
like it took him a couple weeks to get it right. i believe he was
installing from sources, reading whatever documentation he could, etc. i
don't think that it is a trivial task.
  
| 3 - So, I can either fix the from-source version or wipe it all and 
| install the RPMs, which are apparently included with Redhat 9.

this is what i think you should do.
  
| I don't know the proper operating assumptions to use Linux and that option
| never occurred to me until I talked to this board.  I feel like I'm in no
| position to determine the best way to fix this problem.  And future
| problems.  

don't take the hard work of the people who package distros (redhat, debian,
etc.) for granted, but do take it :). if you are going to use redhat and
there is an rpm available from redhat, then i would suggest you use it. you
can use checkinstall to make your own:

http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/

from you're previous posts, you mentioned being skeptical of redhat. i can
only speculate there is some animosity because of their tendency to use
nonstandard C compilers and such. well if you are going to use their
distro, you kind of have to accept the good with the bad. if you want
everything to work together nicely, the best thing to do is use their
packages.

| Should I just assume that everything I install should be an
| RPM?  If so, is it safe to assume that 
| % cd /usr/local
| % rm -rf teTeX
| is sufficient [plus striking it from my path]?

i really don't know what to delete here. make uninstall might work best.

| I'm looking for pedagogic advice here.

if you want to learn, you might be more cut out for
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/


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                                               | /"\
 john harrold                                  | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign
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