> However, once I start it, I get a complaint about ".../maxima_saved" not
> being found (I think that's the name). Does anyone know what might be
> going wrong here? This is complicated by the fact that, once I dismiss
> the timeout alert that follows the complaint, the whole desktop is blown
> away, and my login environment is restarted.
These are familiar symptoms (on a FreeBSD system)! xmaxima
seems to assume gcl is used (unfortunately only clisp works
on FreeBSD at present). However,
xmaxima -lisp clisp
cured it.