I had been looking for a good word processor for technical writing for a long time. For my Master's Thesis I used Framemaker from Adobe and after some intense struggling I got it to do what I wanted. After my thesis I continued to use Framemaker, now the beta for Linux and was quite pleased with the result. But, as you may know, Adobe did not deliver, they canceled the beta, and decided not to sell a Linux version of Framemaker. So I had to find me a new word processing tool.
One day I stumbled onto LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) and there I found my perfect tool (I thought at that time.) LyX is a front-end for LaTeX, not a WYSIWYG, but more a WYSIAWYG, (What You See Is Almost What You Get,) and gave me all that I wanted; numbered equations, sections, tables, figures, pages with no trouble at all, and at the same time I got a Table of Contents, list of figures and tables, all without any hassle (this was a real pain in Framemaker.) So to summarize, Framemaker no more.
Next step was to test LaTeX. I had postponed this for a long time, as everyone said that LaTeX was so darn hard to learn. I do not think so anymore, with some good introductions from the net I quickly learned enough to switch from LyX to LaTeX using emacs, AUCTeX, and RefTeX.
For RedHat and Fedora Linux we have teTeX, a collection of programs, scripts, etc. for TeX, and LaTeX. This is one of the standard packages in the distributions. Install all of these tetex packages and you should be ready to go.