Ktikz

If you are doing quite a bit of Latex work with the Tikz graphical librarys then you will probably like to use a wysiwyg program so that you can tweak your wonderful creations. Such a program for Ubuntu is ktikz.

To install it you need to install the latest version of TexLive. If using Ubuntu Natty or later then I think you get the latest version by:

sudo apt-get install texlive

With Maverick or earlier, you need to install the latest version manually to get all the bells and whistles:

wget http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
tar -xzvf install-tl-unx.tar.gz 
cd install-tl-20110526/
sudo ./install-tl

The install will then run through - takes about an hour to download the stuff. You can also download the DVD image via torrent, which would be a good way to have a backup for quick reinstall. Once installed, you need to make sure you update your path:

PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2010/bin/i386-linux:$PATH

Installing the ktikz software is a bit easier. You just run the following commands to grab the dependencies in case you do not have them. BTW this is for Lucid only. There isn't a package for Maverick or Natty yet, but you could roll your own.

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools libpoppler-qt4-dev kdelibs5-dev pgf preview-latex-style
wget http://www.hackenberger.at/ktikz/ubuntu_lucid/ktikz_0.10-1_i386.deb
sudo dkpg -i ./ktikz_0.10-1_i386.deb

You may need to preface some of the scripts with libraries to load:

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\usetikzlibrary{intersections}
\usetikzlibrary{through}