Today I began to use LaTeX to write technical documents. I learned that teTeX, the original default TeX distribution (LaTeX need TeX to work) on Debian is no longer maintained. The current default is TeXLive. So I installed it with: # aptitude install texlive This downloaded 338 MB of packages (when I tried to install texlive-full it offered to download 582MB, no thanks) . I found this very helpful guide to LaTeX from Tobias Oetiker et al. Now to write LaTeX documents.