MAXIMA will not load the draw package

[Dr Justin Whitty]

hi ya Linux Mint Team,

Great Job on the new OS by the way I am really enjoying it.

This was a bug which was present in Mint 17.0 but was fixed in 17.1-17.3 (at least on the Mint-KDE) if this helps. Though I have all of the usual extras aka Maxima-share the load package still does not load, viz.:

load(draw);

loadfile: failed to load /usr/share/maxima/5.37.2/share/draw/draw.lisp
 -- an error. To debug this try: debugmode(true);

The load command should just produce a string reporting where the extra codes has been loaded from. For instance it works when loading the "distrib" tool box thus:
load(distrib)
/usr/share/maxima/5.37.2/share/distrib/distrib.mac

So I guess that the load(draw) command should report something along the lines of:
load(draw)
/usr/share/maxima/5.37.2/share/distrib/share/draw/draw.mac\lisp

The error is present through the front-end wxMaxima as well as directly through the Konsole,
occurring continuously with:
Linux-Mint KDE
Linux-Mint Xfce
and Ubuntu 16.04

It is a quite an annoyance as many of the plotting routines are affected by this. That is some of the other toolboxes require the draw package also.

Your help of course would be most appreciated.

Best reagrds,

Justin

[ernesto (ernesto-bosch)]

Hi,

I just update from Mint 17 Cinnamon to 18 Cinnamon and found the same problem. Lurking a little in the Internet I discover no one has a clear solution so I tried myself.

After a little playing I came up with two solutions:
a.1) remove Maxima 5.37.2 completely from your system,
a.2) go to SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima/files/Maxima-Linux/5.41.0-Linux/),
     get Maxima Linux directory and install (5.41.0 version):

     i) maxima-common_5.41.0-6_all.deb (remember maxima-common first)
     ii) maxima-clisp_5.41.0-6_amd64.deb
     iii) maxima-ecl_5.41.0-6_amd64.deb
     iv) maxima-gcl_5.41.0-6_amd64.deb
     v) maxima-sbcl_5.41.0-6_amd64.deb

a.3) go to your preferred software installer (Synaptic for me) and install wxMaxima.

You will end with a working Maxima up to date environment.

For those more technical biased the problem is in the /usr/share/maxima/5.37.2/draw/draw.lisp
file. To solver it you should (remember you will need "root privileges":

b.1) replace the line

   (load (merge-pathnames (make-pathname :name "draw" :type "system")
         #-gcl *load-pathname*
         #+gcl sys:*load-pathname*))

b.2) with the line

   (load (merge-pathnames (make-pathname :name "draw" :type "system")
         (maxima-load-pathname-directory)))

and the problem is solve (at least for me). You should end with a Maxima 5.37.2
working environment.

Good Luck,

Ernesto

PS: Internet community help me a lot along the years, happy to return.