And don't get me wrong, even though latex is a wonderful material with plenty of applications, what I love is the document creating application that mixes two of the things I love to do the most: making reports and programming...
On the following I'll present how to install LaTeX and my personal editor Kile on the Ubuntu Linux OS, a ridiculously simple task actually!
Lets start!
Now the question is, how to do LaTeX?
Well, the first thing to do as a LaTeX wanna be user is to learn how to install it, which is by following the next simple steps in Ubuntu Linux (sorry Windows users, for you to install it you must download the package and use the .exe to download the packages, I haven't been able to do the configuring as well as on Linux though...).
NOTE: You must have Internet access to download the packages and depending on the version you want it may take up to an hour and a half with a somewhat good network.
What I do is open the terminal using CTRL+T and once inside type the following commands:
$ sudo aptitude install texlive-full
$ sudo aptitude install kile kile-i18n-es
And that's it!
Yes I'm not joking.
Well, maybe, just remembered a catch, in my computer at least it does compile the PDF but gives me an "Unable to show the PDF message", that's because it has the Okular File Viewer as the default in the configuration, either you can reconfigure it to use your standard File Viewer or install Okular which is also much better than Ubuntu's default File Viewer from what I've seen. To do that I go to the Ubuntu Software Center and look for Okular, it configures by default.
You get the full LaTeX package and the editor Kile which is my personal favorite as it includes many useful features like word search, auto completion and is very stable and user friendly, I've tried TexMaker and Tex Live but they haven't lived to my expectations like Kile has.
Hope to get more LaTeX users as it totally beats Office by a long shot in my list, maybe I'll upload a LaTeX tutorial soon!
Bibliography.
You can follow the steps indicated here [SPANISH]:
http://www.proyectociencia.org/blog/?p=39
Some info on LaTeX commands.
http://crysol.org/node/909