Congratulations to @MartinScharrer for earning the macros silver tag badge -- the first silver tag badge ever awarded at tex.sx!

@lockstep: Thanks!

can anyone tell me what's up with my luatex?

@BrandonKuczenski \documentclass is a LaTeX command and you are invoking luatex, the pure tex engine. Try again with lualatex instead.

hmm, it isn't installed

@BrandonKuczenski Are you sure? How did you get your TeX installation? In fact, lualatex is just a symlink to luatex. But the various TeX engines are smart enough to look at the name they were called by to figure out which format to load. So if you just make a symlink from lualatex to luatex then that should work for the time being (but you really should figure out why it isn't there).

Another funny rep number: 22022

Hoping this answer brings me over the 10K hump:

@MatthewLeingang Hope it does and I gave it a contribution:) But I would be very curious to hear your opinion of defining the problem with intervals (disclaimer I am not a mathematician!)

@YiannisLazarides What do you mean by "defining the problem with intervals"?

never mind @YiannisLazarides, I see your answer now.

@MatthewLeingang: not surprised to find you here...hope the book is going well!

Is that @Jason Aubrey?

yup

Nice to hear from you. The book is going well, albeit a bit slowly. I'm on a hiatus for finals then the serious work begins over the summer.

Good luck getting through finals week - btw, check out pushpopppress.com - looks like really innovative stuff

Thanks, will do!

@AlanMunn : You mean don't work for my purposes because of the need to avoid third party packages? I don't know about favorite topic, just the unpleasant reality of journal submissions.

@FaheemMitha I was just joking about it being your favourite topic (hence the smiley). The issue of dealing with journal requirements is definitely a real one, so asking a question about how to do things without particular packages is definitely a worthwhile question. I also think that your question is good independently, since the question I referenced doesn't have a great set of answers.

@AndrewStacey, I don't really know. I got luatex by running 'apt-get install luatex'. I'm a bit out of date here with Ubuntu Jaunty.. but I hoped that wouldn't be an issue.

btw, after creating the symlink for lualatex, I get the following:

@BrandonKuczenski: For doing anything with modern TeX engines, the versions in Jaunty are ancient. You should not expect things to work well. Better install TeX Live 2010 from tug.org/texlive. (btw, Ubuntu Jaunty is out of support and won't get security updates anymore. You should upgrade your OS).

yeah yeah I know. it's a nasty habit. good to know that's the explanation.

@BrandonKuczenski To follow up on Caramdir's comment, Ubuntu is really behind on its TeX distribution (even Natty is out of date) and they split it up into lots of separate packages. You would need to install something like tex-base to be sure that you got the core and then add stuff to that (not sure of the exact names). But by far the best is to do as Caramdir says and install TeXLive from TUG. That way, you can be sure that you have everything.

Wow! I've just hit the rep cap two days running. I haven't done that since private beta (give or take a day).

@AlanMunn : Ok. Thanks for the feedback. And no offense taken.

is there really a lot of difference between TL 2009 and 2010?

@FaheemMitha Depending on which packages you use. PGF/Tikz and 'addons' have been significantly improved. And of course everything using XeTeX and LuaTeX (e.g. fontspec and unicode-math) is usually still in constant development and the current versions offer more functionality and (usually) less bugs.

If you just use LaTeX and packages that have been stable for years (e.g. amsmath, graphicx), then there won't be much difference.