LaTeX in Linux (CentOS)

[Sam]

Dear All,

I have CentOS 4.8 installed in my PC. I wan to use Kile (LaTeX editor) to prepare documents.

1. Do I need to install Kile as third party software in CentOS?

2. Do I need to install any compiler as third party?

3. Any other configuration steps, if any, to be followed?

Please let me know.

I don't know whether this is the right place to ask this. But if somebody can help me it would be great.

regards

Sam

[Paul Johnson]

> -

Dear Sam

Centos 4.8 is way old. That's way way old. I've been running Centos
for 6 years in our computer lab and I've always been in the 5's. So
you might consider upgrading.

On a new-ish Centos system, the LaTeX processor included is the pretty
old "texmf", but you will probably find that is OK. texmf will be in
the base rpm collection, I'm almost certain. You can get TexLive from
other places if texmf is too old.

Does Centos 4.8 even have yum? If so, you an always use yum to search
to see if kile or texmf is in your existing repositories. If not,
you can add some repositories.

I don't think you are going to find many repositories that have RPMS
old enough for Centos 4.8, actually, but if you wonder where to find
the kile RPM, here is a good way. Just pick one addon repository, I
use EPEL, and from EPEL, get the RPM for "yumex", which will give you
a GUI search and install thing. You can see what is available.

The down side of using a distro like Centos is that lots of addon
extras are not provided with it, it only includes the things that
Redhat likes to support. So that's why you generally will need a repo
like EPEL. The RPM community has not organized itself very well to
offer one repository that has everything you need in a consistent set
of packages, there are other sites like atRPMS and RPMFUSION and
rpmFORGE and who knows what else. In my experience, EPEL is most
likely to be consistent with Centos, and the others may bring in
updates that break things you need for other purposes. So , when you
find RPMS from those other sources, don't let yum install them for
you. Download the RPMs and manually install to prevent too much
unintended change.

Good luck. HTH
pj

--
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas

[Peter Flynn]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Sam <samir...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear All,

I have CentOS 4.8 installed in my PC. I wan to use Kile (LaTeX editor) to prepare documents.

1. Do I need to install Kile as third party software in CentOS?

What do they (or you) mean by "third-party software"?
Does it mean "package that is not in the CentOS repositories"?
If they don't provide it in their own software manager, then yes, you need to find a precompiled, prepackaged version that will run on CentOS from elsewhere.

AFAIK, CentOS is binary-compatible with RHEL, so you should be able to type
sudo yum install kile
and it will install it and any dependencies for you (but see my warning about tetex below first).
 

2. Do I need to install any compiler as third party?

What do you mean by "compiler"? C? C++? Or did you mean TeX (some people call it a "compiler")?

• You do need a full installation of TeX, of course: that is the typesetting engine that LaTeX uses. LaTeX is included in all TeX distributions.
• You only need a C or C++ compiler if you plan on recompiling kile from source, which I don't recommend at all these days unless you're a masochist :-) It should be available as a package.

Be careful: under no circumstances whatever should you install any version of the obsolete tetex distribution, as it is no longer supported or maintained. texlive is the one to go for. I mention it because when I searched for "kile centos" I got some Red Hat pages which listed tetex as a dependency for kile. The reason I ditched Red Hat and RPMs for Ubuntu and debs was that everything Red Hat seems to be out of date by several years, especially RHEL.
 

3. Any other configuration steps, if any, to be followed?

The easiest way by far is to install using packages provided by your OS. For Ubuntu these are:
texlive-full, kile, ghostscript, kpdf, kdvi (or okular if kpdf/kdvi are not available). They must surely be available for CentOS as well: Red Hat surely can't be that out-of-date. Or maybe it can.

Kile was written for the K Desktop Environment. If that is the interface you are using on CentOS, then all the dependencies (KDE libraries) should already be installed. If you are using another interface such as Gnome, then you will need to download and install all the necessary dependencies first.

If the packages for texlive and kile really, really aren't available, then get the TeX Live DVD and install texlive from that. Contact me off-list if you have problems getting it. You will then have to download the source of kile from Sourceforge, and you will indeed need a C compiler and probably a lot more.

But that should be the absolute last resort. These days all this stuff should be available prepackaged, and you just install by clicking on it in your OS's package manager. If CentOS is so badly out of date that kile and texlive are not available, then I would very strongly recommend ditching it and moving to another more up-to-date distribution.

///Peter