NOVAthesis and Linux

Update your TeX-Live distribution

Tex-Live distributions are outdated in most (if not all) of the Linux distributions.

Iy is strongly advised to:

1. Remove the tex-live packages instaled with your Linux distribution
2. Install TeX-Live from their site with the “netinstall” script.

Check this video illustrating instalation of TeX Live in Ubuntu 18.

Tips and Tricks for Linux

LuaTeX & xelatex do not work in Ubuntu 20.04 (suggested by @jmg-duarte/José Duarte)

Ubuntu 20.04 does NOT ship kpfonts-otf and thus LuaTeX/xelatex will not work out of the box. https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/all/texlive-fonts-extra/filelist

It seems to me that fixing it can be done as follows:

wget http://mirrors.ctan.org/fonts/kpfonts-otf.zip
unzip kpfonts-otf.zip
sudo cp -r kpfonts-otf/tex/ $(kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFDIST)/tex/latex/kpfonts-otf/
sudo cp -r kpfonts-otf/doc/ $(kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFDIST)/doc/fonts/kpfonts-otf
sudo cp -r kpfonts-otf/fonts/ $(kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFDIST)/fonts/kpfonts-otf/
sudo ln -s "$(kpsewhich -var-value=TEXMFDIST)/fonts/kpfonts-otf" "$HOME/.fonts/OTF/kpfonts-otf"
sudo fc-cache -svf

Arch Linux

As Arch Linux is a bleeding-edge distribution, the packages from the official repositories are generally very up-to-date and can be used with NOVAthesis without the need to download from other sources. It's highly recommended you check out the TeX-Live documentation on ArchWiki.

In order to setup your environment, use pacman to install the texlive-most package group as it includes the main TeX-Live software as well as plenty of useful LaTeX packages. Also install biber as it is the default bibliography package used by NOVAthesis.

After having set up the environment, you may want to install a LaTeX editor.

Working with non-latin characters

If your thesis involves working with non-latin characters, such as Greek characters, you can check out the texlive-lang package group, which includes packages to handle many different languages.

Installing CTAN packages

If the package you intend to use is not in any of the TeX-Live packages in the Arch Linux repositories nor it is in the AUR you can install tllocalmgr-git from the AUR, which is a helpful package manager for Arch Linux with installs LaTeX packages from CTAN, check out its usage to learn how to use it.