This document covers the basic installation and usage of the teTeX TeX and LaTeX implementation under the major U.S. Linux distributions, and auxiliary packages like Ghostscript.
TeX is implemented for practically every serious computer system in the world---and quite a few ``non-serious'' ones---so implementors must provide the installation facilities for all of them. This accounts in part for teTeX's complexity, in addition to the inherent complexity of any TeX installation. It also accounts for the fact that installing the system yourself is a significant task, and unless you are already familiar with TeX, it is easy to get lost in the numerous executable programs, TeX files, documentation, and fonts.
Fortunately, teTeX is part of the GNU/Linux distribution. You can install the package much more easily using GNU/Linux installation tools. You may already have teTeX installed on your system. If so, you can skip ahead to Section Using teTeX.
However, if you want to install the package, the archives necessary for a workable teTeX installation are on the CTAN archive network. There is a list of these sites in Section CTAN site list.
CTAN is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, a series of anonymous FTP sites that archive TeX programs, macros, fonts, and documentation. In the course of using TeX you'll probably become familiar with at least one CTAN site. In this document, a pathname like ~CTAN/contrib/pstricks means ``look in the directory contrib/pstricks of your nearest CTAN site.''
The installation of the generic teTeX distribution described in Section Installing the CTAN teTeX distribution concentrates on the Intel versions of Linux. Installing teTeX on other hardware should require only substituting the appropriate executable program archive in the installation process.
In addition to the executable programs, the distribution includes all of the TeX and LaTeX package, metafont and its sources, bibtex, makeindex, and all of the documentation... more than 4 megabytes' worth. The documentation covers everything you will forseeably need to know to get started. So, you should install all of the documents. Not only will you eventually read them, the documents themselves provide many examples of ``live'' TeX and LaTeX code.
TeX was written by Professor Donald Knuth of Stanford University. It is a lower-level typesetting language for all of the higher-level packages like LaTeX. Essentially, LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that provide convenient, predefined document formats for end users. If you like the formats provided by LaTeX, you may never need to learn bare-bones TeX programming. The difference between the two languages is like the difference between assembly language and C. You can have the speed and flexibility of TeX, or the convenience of LaTeX.
By the way, the letters of the word ``TeX'' are Greek, tau-epsilon-chi. It is not a fraternity, but the root of the Greek word, techne, which means art and/or science. ``TeX'' is not pronounced like the first syllable in ``Texas.'' The chi has no English equivalent, but TeX is generally pronounced so that it rhymes with ``yecch,'' to use Professor Knuth's example from The TeXBook, which is one of the standard TeX references. When writing, ``TeX,'' on character devices, always use the standard capitalization, or the \TeX{} macro in typesetting.
