Some years ago, I found a very useful tool for anyone who write articles in LaTeX:
AucTeX.
It is an emacs complement that allow us to see, inside the text editor, the equations that we write, as well as figures and tables in a "WYSIWIG" way, without the necesity of compiling the text each time.
Up to the Ubuntu version 10.10, we could install just it writing in a command line
$ sudo apt-get install auctex
Unfortunately, since the version 11.04, the package stopped working well, seemly, because of a problem with the library versions.
To fix it, simply download the source code of the package from .... , compile and install it.
To make it easier, here you can download a .deb package generated from these sources. After installing the official version of auctex, simply install the package with the corrections:
$ sudo apt-get install auctex
$ sudo apt-get install auctex
I hope you find it useful.