Installing Maxima on non-root Red Hat Enterprise 4?

Greetings, I seek assistance in using Xmaxima on an RHEL 4 workstation on which I lack root access. I successfully used "rpm2cpio | cpio -ivd" on all three most recent CentOS RPMs (maxima, maxima-exec, xmaxima) and I can get the console "maxima" to work just fine (so far as I've done simple tests), but trying "xmaxima" opens a Tk window, and an error that "Documentation not found in /usr/share/maxima/5.17.0" (followed by a similar error) and then a string of errors printed to my terminal (which I omit in this email). I can probably use just maxima, but I am curious if there are a few environmental variables that I can set for Xmaxima to work in its glory.

I am grateful for assistance and apologize if this is not the proper venue to ask such mundane questions. Thank you!