I am new to the Mac, and trying to get my bearings....
In particular, I'm trying to install Maxima on Mac OS X 10.7.3 (is that =
OS X.7.3 = OS 10.7.3?). The page about downloads on
sourceforge<http://maxima.sourceforge.net/download.html>gives no
advice for Macs. The Sourceforge
download page <http://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima/files/>; does include
a Maxima-MacOS directory, but as far as I can tell, that installs only
wxMaxima as a Mac application. Which is fine except that it is nowhere
mentioned that that is what it does. (See previous message about wxMaxima /
Maxima confusion.)
When you install wxMaxima from Sourceforge, there are some shell scripts
hidden in /Applications/Maxima.app/Contents/Resources. maxima.sh seems to
work as a simple command-line interface, without auto-adjustment of linel
when window width changes (a good start). But xmaxima.sh gives errors
("Maxima data directory not found").
The Maxima ports page at
sourceforge<http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/maxima/index.php?title=Maxima_ports#MacOS_X>has
lots of information, but no recommendations. It says that Clisp,
SBCL,
and CMUCL are "A-OK", but doesn't say how to install them or Maxima on top
of them. There are also links to things called Fink and MacPorts, which
seem to be twisty mazes of little passages. Presumably I just need to
install from source. I have no problem with that, but instructions would
be nice, as I've never installed anything on a Mac from source. There must
be some standard approach to dependency, source, and build management, but
I'm afraid I don't know anything about those. Can someone help? I
imagine there is some equivalent to Cygwin and I don't have to get down and
dirty with ftp, gzip, tar, git, configure, make, etc.?
Thanks!
-s