Ok guys this is very frustrating. I feel like it is a distribution issue, which is why I put it here. Disagreement to that idea is welcome!

So, I'm trying to use some latex style files (specifically, those in the harvard and REVtex pacakges), but after installing as per instructions and running both mktexlsr and texhash, as root and user (covering all the bases...) my latex calls cannot find anything from either of these packages. I tried putting them in the following directories:

/home/username/texmf (did not exist, so I created it)
/usr/share/texmf (existed)
/usr/share/texmf-local (existed)

the installations both required path names, and above is what I tried. Then I ran mktexlsr and texhash as user and root. Latex can find them when I put them in the directory where I am running latex, but this is supposed to work!

Any suggestions?

It is not possible for me to solve a question myself without first asking the world.

I got it; giving a command

I guess means all my stuff was supposed to be in .texmf-config. This file didn't exist (wha?) so I created it, altered all the makefiles of the packages to point there, texhash and it worked. This seems like a bad system; there should be at least an easy way to modify this enviromental variable to make it useful...

Try to put your packages in $HOME/texmf/tex/latex/

Execute mktexlsr as a normal user once and it should work.

I think it is the right way to add a LaTeX package with only normal user rights.

On an almost unrelated topic, I think the situation is becoming critical with tetex package being totally obsolete now. The installation of a package is becoming more and more complicated and there are sometimes conflicts with the version of the packages.

Thanks to Robby texlive 2009 is already available to download in slackbuilds.org.