in case you did not know about kerTeX distribution

[Antonio Olivares]

Dear folks, 

This is an FYI, there is a new lightweight simple TeX/LaTeX distrubution called KerTeX.  

http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html

It is lightweight, requires few things like bison, flex, ed, lftp, all of which are available in Fedora.  It does not have pdflatex, pdftex, dvipdfm, xdvi,  but many packages can be written for the system.  It is smaller than old TeTeX but it is maintained.  Since Fedora still uses texlive2007 on fedora[except the ones using texlive-repos by J Novy  

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive ] 

The packaging and patents are issues that hold TeXLive in Fedora back.  KerTEX is BSD licensed and has no such issues.  It is designed to be installed through a script ./get_mk_install, but it could be made into a package with some work.  Users interested please download it and try it out.  It is a small texing/latexing system that uses RISK framework.  

Please test it out if you can, and maybe if the interest is there someone can try to package it and make it work independently even if texlive is installed.  

NOTES:
User texifies, latexifies file, tex filename.tex, latex filename.tex, then runs
$ dvips -o filename.dvi filename.ps
or
$ dvips -t letter filename.dvi > filename.ps
then can convert to pdf using ps2pdf with ghostcript installed
$ ps2pdf filename.ps

For big projects and books, still the real TeXLive(from DVD) is the one for the job because the other one will be stopping somewhere because of a certain reason?  Yes and TeXLive is very big [making it difficult to package and patents, nonfree stuff*, etc], so users that want a small portable tex/latex system [without such problems] can use kertex.  

If installing kertex, program will look for libl.a, or libfl.a and will stop in case it does not find it, if flex is installed a link may do the job.  


Regards,


Antonio