Mathematica 6.0.2 installation on Ubuntu

March 10th, 2008 | Categories: Linux, mathematica | Tags:

Mathematica 6.0.2 was released back on February 25th but I have only just managed to find the time to install it. I tried to install it on a brand new Dell 755 with a very fresh install of Ubuntu but near the end of the install procedure I came across the following error

“The installer was unable to check for a valid password file. Your Mathematica installation may be incomplete or corrupted.”

I had not been given the opportunity to supply it with any licensing information so it looked like there was a problem with the installer itself. Cutting a long story sort, the solution is to use apt to install the package libstdc++5 as follows

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

This is a very common package and I guess that I have not seen this error before because libstdc++5 is automatically installed as a prerequisite for many other Ubuntu applications. Hopefully this little note will be of use to a googler or two.

Anyway…I now have 6.0.2 installed and running so expect a breakdown of the new features soon.

  1. April 28th, 2008 at 15:50
    Reply | Quote | #1

    Hi,
    I have a FreeBSD 7.0 box and I couldn’t install Mathematica 6 on it. I used to install Mathematica 6 on FreeBSD 6.2 without any problem. Too bad that there is no native BSD/unix Mathematica…

  2. admin
    April 29th, 2008 at 12:30
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Hi Aaron

    I have never used FreeBSD so I couldn’t possibly comment. I would suggest sending a support query to Wolfram – if they get enough queries from the FreeBSD community then maybe support for it will improve. I hope you get something workable soon.

  3. Yen Lee Loh
    August 7th, 2008 at 18:09
    Reply | Quote | #3

    Thanks! That was a very helpful post! I’m going to try your suggestion.

  4. Alex
    October 2nd, 2008 at 06:51
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Thanks, you rescued my evening. Last time I googled for at least an hour to find the solution to that error message. Now, a few month later, I was trying to install Mathematica again, and of course, did not remember the name of the package required.

  5. A Man
    November 22nd, 2008 at 15:25
    Reply | Quote | #5

    Thanks, this was helpful. Saved me a lot of anguish.

  6. big
    January 15th, 2009 at 14:37
    Reply | Quote | #6

    Thank you so much.

    It work!