Installing Beamer in CAAM

From the Beamer website ( http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net ), The beamer class is a LaTeX class that allows you to create a beamer presentation. It can also be used to create slides. It behaves similarly to other packages like Prosper, but has the advantage that it works together directly with pdflatex, but also with dvips.

These installation instructions of the Beamer class are written for the CAAM environment, installing somewhere else may require some minor changes. This is mostly an adptation of Beamer's excellent User's guide (beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf)

Instructions for Solaris

Grab the latest version of the packages called beamer, pgf and xcolor. The three are required for beamer to work. PGF is a portable graphics package, very useful to handle graphics in different formats, and it has drawing functionality similar to that of pstricks, but without the postscript hacking that the latter needs.
The download pages are all linked in the sourceforge project page, but here are direct links:
- go to latex-beamer and get the latest latex-beamer-x.xx.tar.gz
- go to pgf and get the latest pgf.x.xx.tar.gz
- go to xcolor and get the latest xcolor.x.xx.tar.gz

Ungzip the files, (x.xx stands of course for the version of the file)

  gzip -dc latex-beamer-x.xx.tar.gz | tar xvf -
  gzip -dc xcolor-x.xx.tar.gz | tar xvf - 
  gzip -dc pgf-x.xx.tar.gz | tar xvf -

This creates the directories beamer, pgf and xcolor

Create a local TeX tree, by creating the following directories in your home folder,
```
   mkdir ~/texmf 
   mkdir ~/texmf/tex
   mkdir ~/texmf/tex/latex 
```
and move beamer, pgf and xcolor inside the latter
```
 mv beamer pgf xcolor ~/texmf/tex/latex 
```
Now we have to tell LaTeX where to find this, and this is done through the TEXINPUTS environment variable, edit your ~/.rc/cshrc.common file and add the line (assuming you use tcsh)
```
 setenv TEXINPUTS $HOME/texmf:: 
```
The two semicolons at the end, are important, without them, LaTeX will not know where the default texmf tree (where all the packages lie) is, and you will get weird errors. If LaTeX does not work at all after doing this there must be something different about your environment, revert the changes and read beamer's User Guide for more installation instructions.
Read the documentation
```
 acroread ~/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf 
```
This LaTeX class is very well documented and rather intuitive to use. There are also many examples in the ~/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/examples directory, be sure to have a glance at them and compile a couple of them. Compilation for PDF presentations works only with pdflatex. For example you could compile,
```
 
  cd ~/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/examples
  pdflatex beamerexample1.tex
 
```
When opening the generated PDF the quicklinks that appear on the right of a PDF file may not be defined at first. This works like a table of contents in latex, so it needs to be compiled a couple of times before the references are right.
Email me (fguevara{AT}math{DOT}utah{DOT}edu) if you have any problems with these instructions.

Installing Beamer in CAAM

Instructions for Solaris

Instructions for Mac OS X