[Question] How to use the matieral / read tex files

[ngortheone]

Hi, I am a linux user, I work as Systems Engineer for over 10 years, but I never had to deal with latex/tex files.

Can you provide some basic directions for a self-driven practitioner like me on how to use the material?
It feels like it should be obvious for anyone in academia, but not for me :(

So my questions are:

• How to open tex files
• What is the order in which I need to consume the material? Some sort of ordinal numbering for presentations/labs would be great. Example:

lectures/
- 1-intro
- 2-tracing 
- 3- ...

or alternatively

day1/ 
- lab
- lecture
da2/
- lab
- lecture

It is very hard to self-organize without a professor who directs you. And lastly, and I understand it might be too big of an ask - is it possible to get there an alternative to pptx files? Microsoft products are not very well supported on Linux/FreeBSD and I use Linux on my workstation, and plan to move to FreeBSD. A more opensource-friendly format would be better received on non-MS/non-Apple platforms. (I suspect that tex might be the thin I am looking for, but again, I dunno how to use it)

Thanks!

[rpr1mera]

This is what I did for archlinux, so anyone using anything else will need to look for the relevant packages available on whatever distribution being used.

pacman -S texlive-most

texlive-most is a group alias package, so given that the majority of people don't know which specific LaTeX dependencies will be needed, simply select all of them:

:: There are 12 members in group texlive-most:
:: Repository extra
   1) texlive-bibtexextra  2) texlive-core  3) texlive-fontsextra  4) texlive-formatsextra  5) texlive-games  6) texlive-humanities  7) texlive-latexextra  8) texlive-music
   9) texlive-pictures  10) texlive-pstricks  11) texlive-publishers  12) texlive-science

Enter a selection (default=all): 

Afterwards, you can use the pdflatex utility in this manner: pdflatex $fileName.tex, in order to generate a readable $fileName.pdf file.

Full example:

git clone https://github.com/teachbsd/course
mkdir dtrace
pdflatex --output-directory=dtrace course/practitioner/dtrace.tex
open dtrace/dtrace.pdf