Installing Maxima on non-root Red Hat Enterprise 4?

Ahmed R Fasih wrote:
> 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!
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima at math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
>
>   
You can compile and install maxima from the source file
maxima-5.16.3.tar.gz

After unpacking this file, read the INSTALL file.

It contains, in particular, the following lines:
Installation Names
==================

By default, `make install' will install the package's files in
`/usr/local/bin', `/usr/local/man', etc. You can specify an
installation prefix other than `/usr/local' by giving `configure' the
option `--prefix=PATH'.

You can specify separate installation prefixes for
architecture-specific files and architecture-independent files. If you
give `configure' the option `--exec-prefix=PATH', the package will use
PATH as the prefix for installing programs and libraries.
Documentation and other data files will still use the regular prefix.

In addition, if you use an unusual directory layout you can give
options like `--bindir=PATH' to specify different values for particular
kinds of files. Run `configure --help' for a list of the directories
you can set and what kinds of files go in them.

If the package supports it, you can cause programs to be installed
with an extra prefix or suffix on their names by giving `configure' the
option `--program-prefix=PREFIX' or `--program-suffix=SUFFIX'.

So, you can put everything is a file like
$HOME/local
instead of /usr/local

This should do what you want.

HTH,
-sen