New release candidate with windows installer available

Dear James,

Many sincere thanks for the release of Maxima 5.9.0 rc4. This has been
a very difficult task and you should be congratulated for your success.

So far I have downloaded and installed Maxima 5.9.0 rc4 under
MS-Windows Millennium without problems. It seems that Maxima
5.9.0 rc4 works now smoothly in Windows (contrary to rc1) and,
therefore, most probably, I will definitively move to 5.9.0 from 5.5
beta as soon as the final release of 5.9.0 will appear in the near future.

I have tested a little 5.9.0 rc4 and I have not observed something strange.

My present quite minor recommendations concern just the following
really minor points:

(i) From the Help of XMaxima the options Maxima HomePage,
Project Page and Bug Reports still do not work (and give an
error: "couldn't execute c:\windows\command.com. No such
file or directory") exactly as has been the case with rc1. This
has to and can be corrected before the final release of 5.9.0.

(ii) In the tests of Maxima there has been an error in rtestode.mac
in Problem 43 there in the command

DESOLVE([EQN1, EQN2], [f(x), G(x)])

The error has been that "x+2 contains more than one independent
variable. . . . ". Perhaps this Problem can be omitted or corrected
before the final release of 5.9.0. (I do not know whether this error
is simply due to my own previous commands.)

(iii) Furthermore, although everything has been perfect with the English
version of XMaxima,  when I prepared the Greek version (cp1253
encoding for the further support of the Greek characters such as %pi)
I am now unable to use the icon of Maxima and I have to use Maxima
from Start -> Run. This is not a serious problem, but I do not know
why it happened. (I have restarted the computer, but the problem
remains there, it persists.) The message is: "winkill has caused an
error in winkill.exe. Winkill will now close". This problem was not
present with 5.5 beta. Perhaps it should be corrected or I did
something wrong myself.

(iv) Finally, restarting Maxima from File -> Restart of XMaxima
seems to require about 15 sec, more time than it required with
5.5 beta, but this is not important. More important is that after
restarting the old command prompt, e.g. (C10), and the new
one, (C1), appear in the same line and this has to be corrected.
(The presently missing introductory text for Maxima will be
sufficient for this situation to disappear, I think so.)

I intend to proceed gradually to more extensive tests and bring
my further suggestions to your and the colleagues' attention. I
have also to proceed to some changes in XMaxima analogous
to those I already proceeded (with the precious help of Mike
Clarkson on using XMaxima) with 5.5 beta.

My conclusions are:

(i) Maxima 5.9.0 rc4 seems to work efficiently and, even with the
above quite minor problems present, it is strongly preferable to
5.5 beta for Windows users such as me.

(ii) You should be congratulated for your work on Maxima and,
recently on rc4.  I believe that now the official release of Maxima
5.9.0 will be possible very soon and, moreover, further releases
with minor changes and improvements, such as 5.9.1 and 5.9.2,
will also be possible without the so serious difficulties you faced
with 5.9.0. Therefore, a new era for Maxima seems to begin now.

Many sincere thanks and best regards from Patras,

Nikos

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Amundson" <amundson at fnal>
To: "Maxima List" <maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu>
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 9:26 PM
Subject: New release candidate with windows installer available


> I have finally uploaded release candidate 4 for Maxima 5.9.0 to the
> Sourceforge site. An installer for Windows is now available. I know of
> no issues that would stop this release candidate from becoming the final
> 5.9.0 release. Please test and report your results.
>
>
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4933&release_id=13705
1
>
> Changes:
>
> 1) Windows installer now available. (<-!!!!!!)
>
> 2) Many Xmaxima fixes, particularly on Windows.
>
> 3) Workaround for a bug in texmacs that prevented plotting when maxima
>    is run under texmacs.
>
> 4) Restored several files inadvertently left out of distribution.
>
> 5) Small packaging fixes in rpms.
>
> 6) Several minor bug fixes.
>
> --
> James Amundson <amundson@fnal.gov>