[131] in Software_Announce
[MIT ONLY] Mathematica on Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (alexp@MIT.EDU)
Thu Aug 15 21:18:30 1996
From: alexp@MIT.EDU
To: msug@MIT.EDU, software-announce@MIT.EDU, rushlyn@MIT.EDU,
jim@lowell.MIT.EDU, bert@MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, cfyi@MIT.EDU, facdev@MIT.EDU, nschmidt@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 19:07:51 EDT
I have installed Mathematica 2.2.3 on Athena for Suns and SGIs, to add to our
prior DECstation installation. To run it do "add math; mathematica" to run
the Notebook (X) interface, or "add math; math" to run the ASCII interface.
To get the online documentation, type "mathbook" after adding the locker.
There are man pages (math, mathematica and a few others) but they don't say
a whole lot. There are many commercial texts that are suitable for learning
how to use it in detail.
Please note that we still only have 10 licenses and that it will now become
more likely that you will have to wait for one. I have noticed intermittent
glitches with the license server- it brings up error Dialogs about "unable
to connect to license server; retrying", but then it usually succeeds after
a retry or two. I don't think I'll be able to do anything about this, but we
will move the license server soon (from a DECstation to a Sun) and that may
affect this.
Another idiosyncracy I saw is that on SGIs, if you don't have a $PRINTER
environment variable set in your dotfiles (or by some other means) at
login, you get segmentation faults when you launch Mathematica. This happened
even if I didn't do anything else (like try to print).
Mathematica creates a platform-dependent configuration file in your home dir
but only uses one name, .math22prefs.mb. Because of this, I modified the
startup script to save these in platform-dependent forms
(like .math22prefssgi_53.mb etc.). It takes a few seconds after you exit
for the copying to be completed- if you work on several platforms you will
see a couple of these appear in your home directory, but at least they are
fairly small (a few k).
Please note that Mathematica is not our supported symbolic Math application
and that it is here "as is"; we do not expect to increase the number of
licenses or have local on-campus support. We will do our best to keep it
running and will take bug reports (via sendbug), but can't guarantee
responses.
Alex Prengel, Jr.
MIT Academic Computing Support Team
Software Acquisition Coordinator
