The Vim-LaTeX plugin sets up make, makeprog, and errorformat for compiling single latex files on any system. See the vim-latex documentation for more details about compiling. The vim-latex compilation has several limitations on large multi-document projects which include figures, plots, etc where there are more steps to building than just running pdflatex. This makes building using the vim-latex provided features somewhat awkward. If you want to automatically compile and refresh xdvi whenever you write the current buffer, you can add the following code into your tex.vim ftplugin.