1. 1. DO I REALLY WANT TO DO THIS?

FAQ No. 1. My computer just ate NINE high density diskettes' worth of data. WHAT HAPPENED?

Answer: Installing teTeX on Chanel3, my Compaq laptop, was like dropping a 20-foot concrete bridge section exactly into place from a height of 50 feet. teTeX is a BIG package. Even so, it is a moderately complete implementation of TeX 3.1415 and LaTeX 2e for Linux systems. TeX is very big subject anyway, so you can expect to spend the rest of your computing career keeping up-to-date on the latest in the world of TeX. That is to say, installing and using teTeX is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for daytrippers. You can expect to spend some serious quality time with this package.

Thomas Esser, the author of teTeX, has gone to great lengths to make the package fast, complete, and easy to use. Because TeX is implemented for practically every serious computer system in the world -- and quite a few "non-serious" ones -- implementors must provide the installation facilities for all of them. This accounts in part for teTeX's size. It also accounts for the fact that the pieces necessary to make a workable teTeX installation are spread all over your friendly neighborhood CTAN archive.

CTAN is the Combined TeX Archive Network, a series of FTP sites which archive TeX programs, macros, fonts, and documentation. 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." See Appendix A for a current list of CTAN sites and their mirror sites.

Fortunately, some considerate implementors of the Linux Slackware Distribution have assembled all of the necessary pieces for us. If you haven't installed the Slackware distribution from scratch, you don't have the wonderful Slackware installpkg or setup utilities. Don't worry. It's not too difficult to install the individual pieces of teTeX from the command line.