From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu Mar 14 21:01:50 1996
Return-Path: owner-hackers
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id VAA29732
          for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 14 Mar 1996 21:01:50 -0800 (PST)
Received: from rich.isdn.bcm.tmc.edu (root@RICH.ISDN.BCM.TMC.EDU [128.249.250.34])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id VAA29727
          for <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>; Thu, 14 Mar 1996 21:01:44 -0800 (PST)
Received: (from rich@localhost) by rich.isdn.bcm.tmc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) id XAA21679; Thu, 14 Mar 1996 23:01:40 -0600
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 23:01:40 -0600
Message-Id: <199603150501.XAA21679@rich.isdn.bcm.tmc.edu>
From: Rich Murphey <rich@rich.isdn.bcm.tmc.edu>
To: chuckr@Glue.umd.edu
CC: creilly@maths.tcd.ie, ivan@nauplius.rsmas.miami.edu,
        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960314181704.19932A-100000@skipper.eng.umd.edu>
	(message from Chuck Robey on Thu, 14 Mar 1996 18:21:36 -0500 (EST))
Subject: Re: Mathematica under FreeBSd
Reply-to: rich@lamprey.utmb.edu
Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

|From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@Glue.umd.edu>
|I don't know how many ohters are interested, but I sure am.  I am right 
|now being forced to boot dos and run Mathematica for the Diff Eq class, 
|and this annoys me hugely, besides cutting me off from most of my tools.  
|I asked the Wolfram folks, they said I could chagne from the dos version 
|to the Linux version (student versions, that is) for a nominal charge, so 
|I am extremely interested.

Umm.. gee, I run the Linux distribution of Mathematica
all the time on FreeBSD-current.  I can assure you it
works just fine, including the X front end and mathbook
documentation browser.

The emulator generates a few messages about missing
ioctls which you can happily ignore, but other than
that it works perfectly.

|I've been watching all this linux stuff fly by, because I don't care to 
|play games, but getting me away from dos, well that's another story.  I 
|am going to start learning about the linux emulation.  Does the 
|mathematica version for Linux use the zmagic or ELF libs?  (I have to 
|know how to start this mess ... I will rtfm).

They are staticly linked zmagic executables.  So you
don't have to worry about finding the correct shared
libraries at all.

The only change I made was to set some environment
variables at the head of each of the mathematica shell
scrips that in turn invoke mathematica itself:

RESOLV_HOST_CONF=/compat/linux/etc/host.conf; export RESOLV_HOST_CONF
XKEYSYMDB=/usr/site/math22/lib/X11/XKeysymDB; export XKEYSYMDB

where /compat/linux/etc/host.conf can be created by:

echo 'order bind,hosts' > /compat/linux/etc/host.conf 

Rich