TeXLive is an implementation of TeX for Linux or UNIX systems. TeX takes a text file and a set of formatting commands as input and creates a printable file as output. Usually, TeX is used in conjunction with a higher level formatting package like LaTeX or PlainTeX, since TeX by itself is not very user-friendly. Install texlive if you want to use the TeX text formatting system. Consider to install texlive-latex . The TeX documentation is located in the texlive-doc package.