Maxima
Installation

The main source of information about Maxima is the project page, http://maxima.sourceforge.net.

The needed files are in http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4933: the Windows executable, the rpm's for Linux and the source code for all platforms.

For those Linux distributions based on Debian, you can make use of the packages maintained by the developers of the distribution. See bellow to read how to compile Maxima in Linux Ubuntu.

• Windows installation
• Linux installation
• Source code compilation in Linux Ubuntu

Another Maxima gui is wxmaxima. For more information, visit wxmaxima's project page.

There are also precompiled binaries for those Linux distributions based on the deb packaging system. In any case, if you are a true debianero, for sure you'll enjoy to compile the source code yourself and to read the next section.

Maxima is a very active project, and changes are made constantly. If you don't want to wait for the next release, go to the cvs repository and follow the instructions to download the project in its present state (maybe you have to install first program cvs with synaptic).

Compiling Maxima requires a Lisp environment: gcl, cmucl, clisp and sbcl are all compatible with Maxima. Since the codification system in Ubuntu is UTF-8, either clisp or sbcl are recommended. I make use of both, and they are in the Ubuntu repositories.

Before compilation, make sure you have solved some dependencies, like gnuplot and tcl-tk.

Now, as usual:

cd maxima
./bootstrap    # only if you downloaded the source code from cvs
./configure --enable-clisp   # or:   --enable-sbcl
make
make check
sudo make install
make clean

That's all.

The compilation of the wxmaxima gui requires similar steps.