Installing beamer

The beamer class for making stylish latex presentations is available here. Once the tar.gz file is downloaded and untarred. In the doc/ directory, the beameruserguide.pdf describes in detail the installation process. The salient points are reproduced here:

Switch user to root.
In the texmf directory (in my case it was /usr/share/texmf/)(and let's call it $(texmfdir), find directory tex/.
in tex/, find directory latex/. If it's not there create it.
cd latex/
mkdir beamer/
mkdir xcolor/
mkdir pgf/

Copy all files in the beamer directory (created on untarring the tarball) to:
$(texmfdir)/tex/latex/beamer.

Find pgf package on your machine. If it is not there, download from here.

Untar:
tar -xvzf pgf-1.00.tar.gz

Switch user to root.
Copy all files in the pgf-1.00 to $(texmfdir)/tex/latex/pgf/

Similarly download the xcolor package from here.

Unzip:
unzip xcolor.zip
cd xcolor/

As per the installation instructions found in README, do the following:
latex xcolor.ins

Switch user to root.
cp *.sty $(texmfdir)/tex/latex/xcolor/
cp *.def $(texmfdir)/tex/latex/xcolor/
mkdir $(texmfdir)/dvips/xcolor
cp *.pro $(texmfdir)/dvips/xcolor

Finally update the tex database by:
texhash

That's it. You should be ready to go!