Oleg Shalaev
maxima installationmaxima is actually a sophisticated build-up over lisp rather than an independent calculation package,
There are many lisp realizations; I use mostly gcl and sbcl.
According to my experience, they are equally fast, but sbcl usually needs less memory than gcl.
In addition, it seems that gcl-project is frozen already for several years.
Despite that, I can not completely switch to sbcl since it fails to do certain calculations (complaining about the lack of memory even on a PC with 8Gb RAM).
My OS is linux Ubuntu 11.10; it contains a maxima package, but without sbcl-support.
So I have to compile maxima and sbcl (and also gcl if I can) manually and install them in my home directory.
At first I install all the packages necessary packages:
aptitude install binutils-dev libuclibc-dev gawk autoconf automake autotools-dev \
gettext gnulib libtool equivs libreadline4-dev autobook texinfo automake1.4 binutils-multiarch gcl
In the past I was compiling GCL myself; now I use its version from the standard repository, which works fine.
tar xjf sbcl-1.0.19-x86-linux-binary.tar.bz2
cd sbcl-1.0.19-x86-linux
export SBCL_HOME=
INSTALL_ROOT=$HOME/tmp.local sh install.sh
cd ..
tar xjf sbcl-1.0.57-source.tar.bz2
cd sbcl-1.0.57
time sh make.sh
INSTALL_ROOT=$HOME/local sh install.sh
cd ..
rm -r sbcl-1.0.57
sbcl are equally good. E.g., my program didn't work properly with sbcl 1.0.23.
maxima are problematic; I advise not to install them.
tar xzf maxima-5.27.0.tar.gz
cd maxima-5.27.0
export SBCL_HOME=$HOME/local/lib/sbcl
export GCL_ANSI=affanculo
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local --enable-gettext --enable-sbcl --with-sbcl=$HOME/local/bin/sbcl --enable-gcl --with-default-lisp=sbcl
make && make check && make install
cd ..
rm -r maxima-5.27.0