Maple is not free software, see UbuntuScience for alternatives.

This guide will take you through the steps of installing Maple9.5 or Maple10 in Ubuntu. We will install Maple and create symlinks to the executables.

This may also help troubleshooting installation of maple 16 under ubuntu 12.10.

Installation

• First, we'll create a directory in /opt for Maple. If you are installing Maple 10, you probably want to call this /opt/maple10 instead. If you do, remember to use the appropriate path for the rest of the commands in this guide.

    sudo mkdir -p /opt/maple9.5

• Now, put your Maple 9.5 or Maple 10 cd into your cdrom. It should then be mounted to /media/cdrom. Maple includes a nice installer script for us that we can run:

    sudo sh /media/cdrom/installMapleLinuxSU

  • We have to run the installer through sh since cdrom's are mounted noexec by default.

• Follow the instructions in the Maple installer and choose /opt/maple9.5 as the install directory.

Symbolic Links

• Now so that we can just type maple to start Maple or xmaple to start the graphical version, we need to create symbolic links somewhere in your $PATH. We will be using /usr/local/bin which is reserved for local installations:

    sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
    sudo ln -s /opt/maple9.5/bin/{x,}maple /usr/local/bin

That's it. Have fun taking derivatives

Troubleshooting

• If you receive errors such as

    nawk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

  when you attempt to run the installer, see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283473 and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2184587 .

• If you recieve an error "couldn't load libc.so.6", it could be because the location of the shared library is different from the one the maple installer assumes. Type on a command line:

    sudo ln -s /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 /lib/libc.so

  Make sure you have the libc.so.6 installed. Also i386 needs to be changed according to your architecture (e.g., x86-64 for 64-bit machines).
• If the graphical installer still fails to launch, you need to change the prompt PS1 to something simple: (see maple installation guide)

    export PS1="$ "

• If Maple GUI launchs well but it fails any calculation saying

    Waiting for kernel connection...

  check if you have installed Maple on a FAT32 partition. If this is the case, you should reinstall it on /usr/local/maple for example. This issue applies to Maple 10 and 11.
• This could also be because of failing to load libgmp.so. Assuming that you installed maple in the directory MAPLE_INSTALL_DIR (e.g., /opt/maple16) then on a command line type:

    ln -s $MAPLE_INSTALL_DIR/bin.IBM_INTEL_LINUX/libgmp.so.3.4.1 $MAPLE_INSTALL_DIR/libgmp.so

  or simply rename the file libgmp.so.* to libgmp.so in the appropriate bin.<architecture> directory under the maple install directory.

• If you get an empty GUI window with Maple 11 on Ubuntu 7.10 you need to deactivate visual effects (in System - Preferences - Appearance).

• Another way, if you want to use both visual effects and Maple 11 is to execute the line export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit in a terminal window. Using xmaple should then display the GUI with all contents. You can also add this line to your ~/.profile file, so it will be executed when you log in.

• An even better way is to make Maple use the system's Java libraries.¹

  • Install Java: sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

  • Navigate into the Maple directory and rename jre.IBM_INTEL_LINUX (or jre.X86_64_LINUX on 64-bit systems) by adding .old to the directory name.

  • Create a symlink to the system's directory with Java with ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre jre.IBM_INTEL_LINUX (or ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre. jre.X86_64_LINUX.

  • xmaple should run with Compiz running.

• And if you don't want to use symlinks, you can edit the environmental variables. ²

  • Edit the xmaple file to include export JRE_BASE='/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre' at the top.

  • Comment out the old lines and replace them with MAPLE_JRE_BIN="$JRE_BASE/bin/" and JRE_ROOT="$JRE_BASE/lib"

Print Troubleshooting

• If printing fails or there is no window printing dialog, Click System -> Administration -> Printing and on your selected printer click the Job Options and change Orientation from Automatic to Landscape or other intended orientation, then restart Maple. ³

• If the above does not correct the problem you may want to install openjdk-6-jre and replace java-6-jdk with java-6-openjdk in the above instructions. ³

• If you use the openjdk version and the printing output is scrambled, use the original version of Java that comes with Maple (leave the install untouched) and run Maple under an Xephyr window (adjust location as necessary):

  • Xephyr -ac :1 -screen 800x600 & DISPLAY=:1 ./maple12/bin/xmaple & DISPLAY=:1 metacity &