Main features of the teTeX distribution:

- very easy to install and customize

- the whole distribution can be installed anywhere in the
  filesystem (e.g. /usr/TeX or /usr/local/tex). You do not
  need to set any environment variable as long as you keep
  the original structure of the package.

- a easy-to-use tool to configure tex formats, dvips, xdvi, ...

- well organised inputs tree

- fast file searching. web2c was patched to work with kpathsea-2.4.
  The search paths are chosen to give a high performance.

- kpathsea debugging via the environment variable KPATHSEA_DEBUG
  that allows you to trace:
	stat(2)-calls, hashtable-access, fopen(2)-calls
	searchpaths, variable-expansions and disk searches
  The kpathsea-tools (written by me myself :-) allow you to
  find files, expand variables and searchpaths.

- run-time configuration files for dvi-drivers and tex+friends.
  Search paths can be set up for each executable differently.
  So, you can specify a different TEXINPUTS path for latex2e
  and latex209 (without a shell-script wrapper).

- LaTeX2e patch level 4 together with some extra LaTeX packages,
  including AmSLaTeX 1.2. with full LaTeX2e support.

- very much documentation in texmf/doc, browsable html-index for all
  (exactly 67) dvi-files, plus TeX-FAQ.

- a nice set of fonts to play with: PostScript fonts, ams, pandora, cm, dc,
  oldgerman. All of those are accessable to LaTeX by a single \usepackage
  command (e.g. \usepackage{times} for the PostScript Times family).