This problem about online help is quite common over all linux
distributions... Sometimes the documentation is in a different
package, but often, since man pages are pretty always compressed with
gzip, and the man command can handle such gzipped files, packagers
usually compress all the documentation they found.
I had this problem some times ago with slackware packages, I reported
this issue and now packagers are aware that Maxima cannot handle
compressed help files, so the slackbuild is fine now and Maxima is
fully working.
Maybe it would be useful if in Maxima tarball there were some
instructions/warnings about documentation packaging and handling.
Stefano
2010/1/5 xefe <biomates at telefonica.net>:
> El mar, 05-01-2010 a las 08:59 -0700, Robert Dodier escribi?:
>> On 1/4/10, Alasdair McAndrew <amca01 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Also, I've just installed maxima 5.20.1 on Ubuntu, but for some reason the
>> > online help doesn't work: commands like "?? int" return nothing.
>>
>> Try running maxima --directories to see what is the value of maxima-infodir.
>> There should be several maxima.info* files there. Some packages contai
>> ?gzip-compressed .info files -- if so try uncompressing them.
>> If the maxima.info* files are missing entirely, were they perhaps installed
>> somewhere else? How was Maxima installed, by the way?
>
> I have also found this problem with the compressed files when building
> deb binaries for ubuntu. It took me some time to figure out how to solve
> it during the building process.
>
> Since the question Maxima+Ubuntu is recurrent in this list, I wrote some
> notes trying to guide users.
>
> There are versions both in Spanish and English (or Spanglish, I'm not
> sure) in my web site:
>
> http://www.telefonica.net/web2/biomates
>
> --
> Mario
>
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima at math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
>