Generic

This directory contains generic versions of Macaulay 2, which we have compiled for GNU/Linux so the executable program M2 depends on as few dynamic libraries as possible, and so the libraries are relatively old. We do that to make it as likely as possible that you can run it on your machine.

For us to link against an old version of the standard system library libc.so.6 is especially useful, since the program will refuse to run with an older one on your system. For example, in preparing Macaulay2 1.6, we linked against libc 2.11, which was already 3 1/2 years old.

There are some dynamic libraries that we must nevertheless link with, such as libc and libncurses. If you have versions of these on your machine are sufficiently different from the versions on ours, the program will not work. See the corresponding *-README.txt files for information about the libraries M2 is linked against.

The tar files come in pairs, one containing the architecture dependent files (in this directory), and one containing the architecture independent files and having "common" in the name. The latter can be obtained in Common/. Download and untar both files in the same directory, such as in a new directory with a name of your choice. The Macaulay2 executable is the file Macaulay2-*/bin/M2, where here * denotes the version number; run it to start Macaulay2. If some of the files end up in the wrong place, there will be an error message about the file setup.m2 not being found.

Further instructions about installing from tar files are in ../InstallingFromTarFiles.txt.

Please let us know if your (modern) GNU/Linux system is incompatible with this distribution of Macaulay 2.