Version 5.17 of Maxima released
The latest version of the free open source computer algebra system, Maxima, was released back in late December but I missed it because it was not mentioned on the news page of the main site. It is available for download from the Source Forge project page though. Along with the usual round of bug-fixes and enhancements, this version comes with a lot of extra support for special functions such as the Incomplete Gamma Function and the Error Function.
For more details concerning what is new in version 5.17 check out the general and special function change logs.
Hi Mike,
Is there a download for Ubuntu?
Hiya
I couldn’t find one – all the Linux binaries seemed to be for CentOS. I just downloaded Maxima-source and compiled it. The compilation is very straightforward but you need to ensure that you install a lisp implementation using apt-get or Synaptics (I used the package clisp) . Looking at my bash history I did the following (with maxima in my current working directory)
tar -xvzf ./maxima-5.17.1.tar.gz
cd maxima-5.17.1/
./configure
make
The binaries appeared in the maxima directory and were called maxima-local and xmaxima-local for the terminal and GUI versions respectively. So do
./xmaxima-local
to run it. I think that if I had done
sudo make install
then it would have installed the binaries in all the standard locations but I didn’t want to interfere with the Ubuntu version of Maxima so I am using 5.17.1 from the directory I compiled it in.