> That had an effect: I no longer get the complaining about
> '.../maxima_saved'. However, the rest is still an issue. The GUI is
> essentially non-functional (as far as double-clicking is concerned), and
> I do still get the timeout dialog (waiting for maxima to start), after
> which, the login environment bails. This could be an XonX problem, but
> I don't get the reason for the timeout.
login environment bailing is xmaxima's fault. See below.
xmaxima is a wish script (a Tk/tcl program). Perhaps you can
try debugging it? Which version of wish (& tk/tcl) works on
os X? I have successfully used 8.2 & 8.3 on FreeBSD.
Look in the `runOneMaxima' procedure in xmaxima. I suspect
what is happening is this: it sets a variable `pid' to -1 and
then tries starting up a maxima process. If it successfully
starts maxima, $pid will be set to the pid of this new
process. But somehow this doesn't happen. Ultimately it
times out and (in closeMaxima) it does "kill -TERM $pid".
Since $pid is still -1, it kills everything belonging to the
user (you!).
Basically the catch procedure should not be killing anything
until after it knows there is something to kill!
To deal with the pid == -1 problem, try starting xmaxima
under a different user id (while still being logged as you).
At least you will be able to see what is going on. The
popup error window should tell you what fails (something
like "Can't execute /usr/local/lib/maxima-5.6/bin/ ...").
>From which perhaps you can figure out what is wrong. You can
also add some debugging code in xmaxima in the `openMaxima'
procedure to see what is going on.