On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 11:29 +0100, Armando Martins wrote:
Any advice about Tex friendly distros?
Well, I can only say this: My best experiences for "out of the box" functionality are from Ubuntu. Like Debian, they have taken TeXlive and broken it up into a number of packages to allow for some installation options and less bloat. Of course, you have the typical Linux ideology thing going on, so they also take whatever the DFSG thinks to be "non-free" and separate it out as its own package. Then they gzip the docs so you have to gunzip them if you want to use Acrobat, for example. MacTeX on OS X is really done quite well. I have no complaints. But you need a Mac, or forget it. I like FreeBSD, but its ports system does not seem to have the same philosophy as TeXlive, or there are just too few working on it there. I mean, if Debian can do it, why don't the clever duckies just look at a few build scripts... So there you either have to use the prebuilt FreeBSD binaries and install it yourself or build it from source, which I rather like to do anyway. I haven't tried on the other BSD's. I have generally found the Redhat family to be increasingly irksome for a number of reasons, not the least of which are SELinux and YUM. The same goes for SUSE, where YaST is king. I stopped using them before I moved from TeTeX. I am intrigued by Gentoo and its portage, but haven't tried it. And, just for grins, you can run good ole TeX on Plan 9. My last MikTeX experience yielded non-portable DVI files, that meaning all DVI viewers under Linux that I tried could not read a DVI generated by MikTeX. I think PDF works, though. But it's Microsoft . . . Charles