Teaching differential equations with Maxima

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks to your kind help and support, I have been able to
accompany my engineering-oriented Applied Mathematics 
course last semester with several Maxima's exercises (most
of them engineering-oriented of course), and I dare say I am 
satisfied with the interest and the progress of my students and
their using Maxima (at an elementary level of course).

This I intend to repeat the next semester, to begin on February 24
2003 at the University of Patras, where my Applied Mathematics
course will be mainly oriented towards differential equations
(including Laplace transforms).

In order to get properly prepared, I have read the documentation
and tested a little the commands ODE2, IC1, IC2, BC2, 
ATVALUE, LAPLACE, ILT, DELTA, DESOLVE, etc.
more or less successfully.

Yet, wishing to have further computational power from Maxima, I 
would be extremely thankful to you if you could bring to my attention
any further Maxima command or package directly concerning
differential equations (mainly) and Laplace transforms.

For example, it would be very nice to have commands for linear
higher-order differential equations with constant coefficients, 
characteristic polynomials, systems of differential equations
without Laplace transform techniques, series solutions, etc. 
Naturally, such commands should be in GPL or strongly-related 
copyright situation (not from commercial Macyma, etc.), so that 
I can distribute the related packages (together with Maxima 
itself, perhaps 5.9.0 final if released in time) to the students
(CD-ROM distribution) for homework as I already did in the
first semester.

To be sincere, I do not wish to remain with the impression that 
the classical algorithms for the solution of constant-coefficient
linear differential equations of order three or higher have not 
been programmed in Macsyma. (Of course, I know that
DESOLVE, based on Laplace transfoms, is already available
in Maxima for single equations and systems of equations.)

Finally, I have seen (in the SHARE library of Maxima 5.9.0,
rc4, differential equations) the package ODEAUX.MAC
(without instructions), but I am unable to use it. Has been
any colleague ever able to use it in Maxima (not in 
commercial Macsyma!) any release, so far? I believe 
not, but I would like a confirmation of this situation and
some explanations if possible and I may attempt to 
improve this situation in the future if able. Many thanks!

I am already grateful to you for your so kind help, which 
permitted us to use Maxima here in Patras (without this
help nothing could have been achieved) and I will also
be thankful to any colleague for further help and suggestions.

If nothing more is available, perhaps, I will attempt 
to prepare some simple commands myself in the
Maxima language, but this is an extremely difficult
task for me because I am still a novice in using Maxima 
with almost no experience in programming (and I do 
not know LISP at all of course).

Many sincere thanks in advance! Any help will be greatly
appreciated!

Best regards from Patras,

Nikos