solving equations



Hi,

I am starting to learn maxima. The best is to do by examples. So I
have those equations:

eq1:x^2/a^2+y^2/b^2=1;
eq2:A(x-x0)+B(y-y0)=0;

And I want to solve them for A and B. I have the solution in front of
me in the notebook, I just want maxima to do it now, to see how it
works. So in my notebook I do following things:

eq3:(eq1-1)*(a*b*B)^2;
eq4:eq3+eq2;

B_result:solve(eq4,B);

And here I'm stuck. I would expect maxima to calculate
Delta=b^2-4*a*c with respect to B. And show two answers for B.
But it does not.

Having B, I could go forward and calculate A.


I have debian squeeze, and I tried to use to_poly_solve but:

load("to_poly_solve");
Could not find `to_poly_solve' using paths in file_search_maxima,file_search_lisp.
 -- an error.  To debug this try debugmode(true);

same for to_poly_solver, but topoly loads:

load("topoly");
/usr/share/maxima/5.17.1/share/contrib/topoly.lisp

but still this doesn't work:

to_poly_solve([eq4], [B]);


thanks in advance for your help
-- 
Janek Kozicki                                                         |