To compile the previous section’s LaTeX source file, small.tex, into a pdf file for on-screen viewing, do:
pdflatex small.tex
This will run the source file small.tex through pdflatex and, if all’s well, produce a file named small.pdf.
The resulting file may be viewed with a pdf viewer. The most common pdf viewer is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader which is available for free for use on essentially any computer platform.
An alternative is Glyph & Cog, LLC’s Xpdf which runs under the X Window System on unix, vms, and os/2.
Another alternative is the Gnome desktop’s document viewer, Evince, which should be available on most Linux platforms.