Hello Ray,
I am using Maxima on Ubuntu. I installed clisp and if I remember right
also gnuplot via Ubuntu's synaptic. To install Maxima and wxMaxima I
downloaded the deb files from
http://zeus.nyf.hu/~blahota/linux/index.php
Istvan Blahota frequently builds Maxima deb-packages. You can choose
between a clisp and a sbcl build.
I do it that way since Maxima 5.17 and I never had any problems with
that.
I guess Ubuntu is using debian's sid packages. Maintainer is Camm
Maguire. I tried to contact him around easter this year and got response
from his company that he quits his job. I do not observe any maintenance
of Maxima by Camm in debian any more. I believe it's broken. I do not
hope that Camm is in big trouble.
So in fact in debian sid there is still Maxima 5.17.1 and no improvement
in sight. I think it's time to get the people of debian and Ubuntu
informed about that. So who is to contact?
At the moment I recommend to link Istvan Blahota's page with Maxima as
the download source for deb packages.
Volker van Nek
Am Donnerstag, den 10.12.2009, 12:35 -0500 schrieb Raymond Toy:
> Recently there have been quite a few bugs reported about maxima not
> working on Ubuntu. AFAICT, these are not maxima issues, but some kind
> of packaging problem in Ubuntu that distributes either a broken gcl or a
> broken prebuild maxima using gcl.
>
> Does anyone here use Ubuntu? Can we get Ubuntu to update the package or
> remove the faulty package?
>
> It does reflect somewhat poorly on maxima itself, even thought it's not
> maxima's fault. Or perhaps we can drop support for gcl and recommend
> using something else like ecl. (I'd rather not drop support for gcl,
> but we clearly need help from gcl which seems somewhat lacking now,
> unfortunately.)
>
> Ray
>
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