10.3 Installing Mathematica®

10.3.1 Running the Mathematica Installer

First, you have to tell FreeBSD that Mathematica's Linux binaries use the Linux ABI. The easiest way to do so is to set the default ELF brand to Linux for all unbranded binaries with the command:

# sysctl kern.fallback_elf_brand=3

This will make FreeBSD assume that unbranded ELF binaries use the Linux ABI and so you should be able to run the installer straight from the CDROM.

Now, copy the file MathInstaller to your hard drive:

# mount /cdrom
# cp /cdrom/Unix/Installers/Linux/MathInstaller /localdir/

and in this file, replace /bin/sh in the first line by /compat/linux/bin/sh. This makes sure that the installer is executed by the Linux version of sh(1). Next, replace all occurrences of Linux) by FreeBSD) with a text editor or the script below in the next section. This tells the Mathematica installer, who calls uname -s to determine the operating system, to treat FreeBSD as a Linux-like operating system. Invoking MathInstaller will now install Mathematica.

10.3.2 Modifying the Mathematica Executables

The shell scripts that Mathematica created during installation have to be modified before you can use them. If you chose /usr/local/bin as the directory to place the Mathematica executables in, you will find symlinks in this directory to files called math, mathematica, Mathematica, and MathKernel. In each of these, replace Linux) by FreeBSD) with a text editor or the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/local/bin
for i in math mathematica Mathematica MathKernel
  do sed 's/Linux)/FreeBSD)/g' $i > $i.tmp
  sed 's/\/bin\/sh/\/compat\/linux\/bin\/sh/g' $i.tmp > $i
  rm $i.tmp
  chmod a+x $i
done

10.3.3 Obtaining Your Mathematica Password

When you start Mathematica for the first time, you will be asked for a password. If you have not yet obtained a password from Wolfram, run the program mathinfo in the installation directory to obtain your “machine ID”. This machine ID is based solely on the MAC address of your first Ethernet card, so you cannot run your copy of Mathematica on different machines.

When you register with Wolfram, either by email, phone or fax, you will give them the “machine ID” and they will respond with a corresponding password consisting of groups of numbers.

10.3.4 Running the Mathematica Frontend over a Network

Mathematica uses some special fonts to display characters not present in any of the standard font sets (integrals, sums, Greek letters, etc.). The X protocol requires these fonts to be install locally. This means you will have to copy these fonts from the CDROM or from a host with Mathematica installed to your local machine. These fonts are normally stored in /cdrom/Unix/Files/SystemFiles/Fonts on the CDROM, or /usr/local/mathematica/SystemFiles/Fonts on your hard drive. The actual fonts are in the subdirectories Type1 and X. There are several ways to use them, as described below.

The first way is to copy them into one of the existing font directories in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts. This will require editing the fonts.dir file, adding the font names to it, and changing the number of fonts on the first line. Alternatively, you should also just be able to run mkfontdir(1) in the directory you have copied them to.

The second way to do this is to copy the directories to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts:

# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
# mkdir X
# mkdir MathType1
# cd /cdrom/Unix/Files/SystemFiles/Fonts
# cp X/* /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/X
# cp Type1/* /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/MathType1
# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/X
# mkfontdir
# cd ../MathType1
# mkfontdir

Now add the new font directories to your font path:

# xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/X
# xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/MathType1
# xset fp rehash

If you are using the Xorg server, you can have these font directories loaded automatically by adding them to your xorg.conf file.

If you do not already have a directory called /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1, you can change the name of the MathType1 directory in the example above to Type1.