remarks to installation of maxima on suse8.1 linux

Hello,
maxima is great and it's fun to work with  :-) ! I'm a newbie with 
maxima (and lisp, too),
my experience with the installation might be interesting for you.
The installation of
maxima-5.9.0rc3-1.i386.rpm
maxima-exec_gcl-5.9.0rc3-1.i386.rpm
didn't work from the beginning, because of cross-references I had to 
install both files with
"rpm -i maxima*".
After that I had to create two symbolic links
ln -s /usr/libexec /libexec
ln -s /usr/share /share
to get the plot*d- and example-functions to work.
I don't succeeded with the describe() and the ?-command, because I got 
no error messages.
The info-files are in /usr/share/info.

Before installing the rpm-files (and deinstalling gcl, see below)
I tried to compile gcl2.4.4 from the source, on the whole I got it with 
gcl,
but not with maxima. By "make install" of gcl I got the error

 >(cd elisp ; make install DESTDIR=)
                                                      ^
make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/local/gcl-2.4.4/elisp'
mkdir -p
mkdir: too few arguments
Try `mkdir --help' for more information.
make[2]: *** [install] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/gcl-2.4.4/elisp'
make[1]: *** [install1] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/gcl-2.4.4'
make: *** [install] Error 2

gcl seemed to work for me, therefore I tried to compile maxima,
but with "make" I got the error

;        - Compiling source file "numerical/slatec/zbesk.lisp"
Compiling numerical/slatec/zbesk.lisp.
End of Pass 1.

Error: Can't print a non-number.
Fast links are on: do (si::use-fast-links nil) for debugging
Error signalled by LISP::CATCH.
Broken at COMPILER::CTOP-WRITE.  Type :H for Help.

Any ideas with 'describe()' and '?' ?


Manfred