Note: the text below should be identical to the contents of INSTALL.CYGWIN in the FriCAS distribution. These instructions show you how to build FriCAS on MS Windows from the sources in the subversion repository. You may want to consider building FriCAS from a distribution tarball instead, which contains pregenerated algebra Lisp, HyperDoc pages and graphic examples. Moreover, using the tarball the build is much faster - a few minutes instead of a few hours. You can get a tarball via http://fricas.sourceforge.net/download.html First of all, do not be afraid! The instructions below probably look more intimidating than they really should be. In case something goes wrong, do not hesitate to ask at fricas-devel@googlegroups.com. To compile FriCAS on MS Windows, we proceed as follows: I) If you do not have cygwin installed, go to http://cygwin.com/ Look for a link called setup.exe and save it to disk. II) Start cygwin's setup program. The first few questions can be answered with the default values, until you get to the "Select Packages" dialog. Clicking on a little + will expand the list of packages. You should select apart from the defaults the following: (DISCLAIMER: this list is likely to be overkill. Also note that selecting will also select many packages they depend on, this should happen automatically.) In Devel: gcc-mingw gcc-mingw-core make patchutils subversion In Math: clisp In Publishing: psutils tetex tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-extra tetex-tiny tetex-x11 In Web: wget In X11: xterm xorg-x11-devel optional In Editors: emacs (see V) emacs-X11 Complete the cygwin installation process. III) start cygwin - a black console window should appear find a place to build FriCAS. cd /cygdrive/c mkdir scratch cd scratch (it is essential that the path to scratch does not contain any spaces. Otherwise the build won't work...) IV) follow the instructions in INSTALL (but note that we are going to build FriCAS using clisp), that is: 1) Fetch sources: svn co https://fricas.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fricas/trunk fricas 2) Fetch nonstandard prerequisites: cd fricas mkdir zips cd zips wget https://axiom.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/axiom/trunk/axiom/zips/noweb-2.10a.tgz or, if this doesn't work: wget --no-check-certificate https://axiom.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/axiom/trunk/axiom/zips/noweb-2.10a.tgz 3) create the build directory (again: without spaces!) cd ../.. mkdir ax-build cd ax-build 4) configure. Possibly, you will have to restrict the PATH to Cygwin programs, because otherwise configure may pick, for example, Borland grep which causes failure later. You can do this by typing export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin ../fricas/configure --with-lisp=clisp 5) build and install: make make will very likely fail with an error like mkdir /dev/null 2>/dev/null make[1]: [install-elisp] Error 1 (ignored) cp elisp/noweb-mode.el /dev/null cp: cannot create regular file `/dev/null': Invalid request code make[1]: *** [install-elisp] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/cygdrive/c/scratch/ax-build/noweb/src' make: *** [stamp-noweb] Error 2 we ignore this error (which occurs because the ELISP environment variable is set to /dev/null) touch stamp-noweb make 6) make the graphics examples: IMPORTANT NOTE: this step failed when I tried. After the first drawing appeared and disappeared, it did not continue. The example graphics are in no way essential though and can be easily reproduced in the installed system. 6a) start X: sh /usr/X11R6/bin/startxwin.sh a new (white) console should appear 6b) run the examples cd /cygwin/c/scratch/ax-build/src/paste make gphts at this point (which will take a while), graphics should appear and disappear. cd ../.. make 7) install make install V) you may want to install the emacs mode coming with FriCAS. In this case you need to: 1) start cygwin's setup program again and select the packages: In Editors: emacs emacs-X11 2) install the emacs mode and a startup script: cd /cygwin/c/scratch/fricas/contrib/emacs cp fricas*.el /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp cp efricas /usr/bin 4) if you installed the startup script, you can start FriCAS now with sh /usr/X11R6/bin/startxwin.sh efricas |