The tex and latex package in chow has version Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1). It is not the latest version of tex package, but is the newest version from Redhat distribution. We will install newer version in near future. Please let me know if you encounter problem in typesetting, or has font problems.
You can use pdftex and pdflatex to produce PDF files directly from tex and latex source, by-passing the dvi file stage.
The command latex2html is available, which takes a latex file and produces a series of html documents and gifs which can be viewed in a web browser. It works for simple documents, but can have trouble with more complicated documents. See its online manual.