How to install Maxima on OS X

Stuart Schmitt
 
7 August 2007
original version, 10 January 2007


Introduction

The purpose of this page is to provide step-by-step instructions for installing Maxima on a computer running Mac OS X. Maxima is a computer algebra system, much like the commercial packages Mathematica and Maple. XMaxima is simply Maxima in graphical-interface mode.

You will be downloading and compiling the source codes of the Maxima package and the modules it depends on. Therefore, this web page assumes an intermediate knowledge of the UNIX command line. Information about UNIX commands abounds on the Web; use a search engine to find instructive web pages if something below is unfamiliar.

These instructions have the following assumptions:

• The Apple Developer Tools must be installed. They were installed on my computer when it was manufactured.
• The libiconv library must be installed. It also came installed on my computer. I think I needed to install it manually on my previous computer, which ran OS X 10.3 (Panther).
• Tcl/tk must be installed. It is included in OS X 10.4 (Tiger), but it may need to be installed manually for older versions.

Instructions

1. Download the following source code packages.
   • libsigsegv—This is a library for handling page faults, which is when a program tries to access to a region of memory that is not available. This library is necessary for CLISP, which is the language Maxima is written in.
   • GNU CLISP—This is an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp, which is the programming language that Maxima is written in. You should download the source code of the latest version labeled for any archetecture. NOTE: It seems that GCL (GNU Common Lisp) is quite popular in the Lisp programming community. However, it does not work for Maxima on OS X.
   • Maxima—Download the ".gz" source code of the latest version labeled for any architecture.
   • gnuplot—Download the ".gz" platform-independent source code for the "gnuplot" package. If you are interested in trying a beta version, try the source code for the "gnuplot-current" package.


2. Open up a Terminal window and cd to the directory where you downloaded the files above.


3. Change to the root user with the su command. If you don't know what that means, look for information on the web.


4. Decompress the files you downloaded.
   • For .tar.gz files, execute the following commands:
     1. gzip -d [filename.tar.gz]
     2. tar -xf [filename.tar]
   • For .tar.bz2 files, execute the following commands:
     1. bzip2 -d [filename.tar.bz2]
     2. tar -xf [filename.tar]
   • For .zip files, execute the following command:
     1. unzip [filename.zip]


5. Compile and install the software packages. This must be done in precisely the order presented here. Some of the commands in this step may take several minutes.
   1. libsigsegv
      1. cd to the libsigsegv-[version] directory produced in step 4.
      2. configure
      3. make
      4. make install
   2. GNU CLISP
      1. cd to the clisp-[version] directory produced in step 4.
      2. export CPPFLAGS="-no-cpp-precomp -I/usr/local/include"
      3. configure
      4. cd src
      5. makemake > Makefile
      6. make config.lisp
      7. make
      8. make install
   3. Maxima
      1. cd to the maxima-[version] directory produced in step 4.
      2. configure
      3. make
      4. make install
   4. gnuplot
      1. cd to the gnuplot-[version] directory produced in step 4.
      2. configure
      3. make
      4. make install

Installation is complete!

Maxima should now be installed. Text-mode Maxima may be accessed by running maxima from Terminal. Xmaxima may be run with the xmaxima command from an xterm window in Apple X11.


Cleanup

If you're confident that Maxima is functioning correctly, you can delete the directories you created in step 4. In terminal type rm -rf [directory], or simply use the Finder.


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