[Blindmath] LaTeX on Windows

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I don't know if you remember about the Summer University event John 
Gardner mentioned about, well I will be giving a workshop on LaTeX and 
would like some advice on how to set up access to LaTeX for the students.

 From the email I have just received it seems like students will be 
bringing their own laptops and that software will be installed on their 
laptops. My concern is that LaTeX (I know of the MikTeX distribution for 
windows) is quite large and depending on space available may take up 
near enough all that remains in some cases (that would be the situation 
on the windows partition of my laptop, I only use LaTeX from Linux now). 
Now as this will be quite an introductory workshop I can't imagine using 
all of LaTeX packages in MikTeX (I think other than the core of LaTeX, 
depending on time I will cover inserting images/graphs and possibly also 
cover beamer). So can anyone suggest a smaller LaTeX distribution for 
windows? I would also like to have tex4ht available (or another LaTeX to 
mathml converter) as it will mean the students can do a sort of checking 
of their output.

I can think of a couple of other solutions but these aren't so 
satisfactory as it would be best the students work in the computing 
environment they use and will continue to use. Examples of alternatives 
I am thinking of is either providing remote access to my laptop (eg. 
ssh) or have a Linux LiveCD with all software required on it and use USB 
memory sticks for the files they create to be stored on.

Thanks for any advice. Those telling me I should use windows more are 
probably right in this case, its just Linux tends to meet my personal 
needs so much better.

Michael Whapples