wotcha,

just upgraded my machine from FC4 -> FC5, & am generally v. impressed. however, am having a problem getting Mathematica to behave itself. couldn't find anything relevant in any of the forums, so here goes ...

1) FC5, fresh install, pulled down the ISOs yesterday. uname gives the kernel as: 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5. I'm running on an AMD athlon processor, 1GB of memory.
2) Mathematica worked fine on FC4 (apart from a hack to do with SELinux which is detailed on the Wolfram site). The version I'm using is Mathematica 5.0
3) The problem generates a bunch of error messages on start up of the form:

###
Warning: locale not supported by Xlib, locale set to C
Warning: X locale modifiers not supported, using default
Warning: translation table syntax error: Unknown keysym name: osfActivate
Warning: ... found while parsing '<Key>osfActivate:PrimitiveParentActivate()'
Warning: translation table syntax error: Unknown keysym name: osfCancel
Warning: ... found while parsing '<Key>osfCancel:PrimitiveParentCancel()'
Warning: translation table syntax error: Unknown keysym name: osfBeginLine
Warning: ... found while parsing '<Key>osfBeginLine:PrimitiveTraverseHome()'
###

& so on. When i try to open a file, the Math. session crashes with a segment violation.

###
Mathematica has received the signal: SIGSEGV and has exited.
###

I've opened a support call with Wolfram, but was wondering if anybody else out there had seen these error messages, & how they resolved them?

Thanks in advance,

thing"unable to do hard sumz"fish

wotcha again,

well, i solved it, so this is here for anybody foolish enough to be using mathematica on FC5!

1st, there's a fonts/X resources issue:

# pushd /usr/X11R6
# mkdir -p lib/X11
# ln -s /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB XKeysymDB
# ln -s /usr/share/X11/locale/ locale

... that cures that sucker; then we have a new, improved problem; the mathematica kernel won't boot. there is a workaround here on the mathematica site, as quoted above, but, & here's the catch: it doesn't work.

what you need to do (as root) instead is:

# cd /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/5.0

... or wherever you installed it, & ...

# chcon -c -v -t texrel_shlib_t SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux/libguide.so
# chcon -c -v -t texrel_shlib_t SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux/libmkl.so

& that has at least got my notebooks being evaluated by the mathematica kernel. dunno whether or not you need to do this to all the shared libraries, but these two got stuff happening. maybe an SELinux/chcon expert out there could enlighten us? i'll post up anything else i find out on this, just in case this thing screws up again ...

okay, did change all the libs to the permissions above, & M now boots up & works okay; however, it seems to take out the task panels with it! interesting behviour, it means that you can't minimise anything & then bring it back up onto the workspace; the panel is simply nonfunctional. you can't swap workspaces, either.

i've got a support call open with Wolfram about this, but has anybody else experienced similar problems?

okay, problem solved.

as root:

# cd <Mathematica Install Directory>

(usu. something like /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/5.0, or whatever version number you have)

# chcon -c -v -R -u system_u -r object_r -t lib_t SystemFiles/Libraries/

# chcon -t texrel_shlib_t SystemFiles/Libraries/$SystemID/*

where $SystemID is your kernel-specific stuff, in my case that translates to plain old Linux.

All good, Mathematica up & running & the SELinux policy set to Enabled. hoopla!

hope this helps anybody else with mathematica install probz!

FYI...

On my FC5 system, I had problems with the backspace even after following these instructions. I fixed them by putting

XMathematica*primaryModifierMask: Mod1Mask
XMathematica*secondaryModifierMask: Mod3Mask

in ~/.Xdefaults, and restarting X.

I'm running Mathematica 5.2 on FC5, and I can run Mathematica, but the GUI interface does not work properly. I can enter commands from the palettes, but tab, space, backspace, etc. do not serve their usual functions; instead, they distort the display and confuse the program. Also, I have a hand (like on pdf documents) instead of a pointer for my cursor and I cannot select areas of the worksheet or even click to follow links in the helpfile.

What confuses me even more is that after I talked with tech support yesterday morning (they had me run the following commands):

# chcon -c -v -R -u system_u -r object_r -t lib_t $InstallationDirectory/SystemFiles/Libraries/
# chcon -t texrel_shlib_t SystemFiles/Libraries/$SystemID/*

And then the program worked beautifully. Then, this afternoon, when I tried to open a notebook file containing the homework problems for a class I'm taking, I got an error message that said the program couldn't find the file LabStyles.nb and so it was going to switch to the default. Ever since I've been back to the same problems described in the first paragraph. I tried running those commands again, I tried reinstalling, nothing seems to work. Does anyone have any ideas for what I can do about this? Thanks!

Hi DB,

(silly question): is your numlock on?

i had this exactly this problem with M. a while ago; try ensuring that your number lock is disabled & then booting up Mathematica. see if you still have the weird GUI-freeze problem.

there is a fix for the num-lock problem out there somewhere, but i'd try this first, just to check that it fixes the GUI-freeze.

one thing: reinstalling is probably not going to help. i think that every time you install, the libraries will have the original permissions in place, which you then have to perform the chcon command on.

hope this helps!

Wow, that's amazing! I would never have guessed something like that in a million years. Thanks so much for your help!

Another piece of information: I myself don't run Mathematica locally, but am running it as well (version 5.x can't remember exactly). Earlier I was using it with Gnome (up to 2.14), it would always destroy panels and after using it I had to make sure no Gnome stuff is running and then re-login to get panels back to life. I also had problems with the mouse: I could select images (for example) from the sheet by clicking on them, but 2nd button wouldn't work and if I tried to click the hyperlinks (like "More information") in Help there was no response. First I thought I had some problems with keyboard (alt+enter didn't evaluate), but afterwards I found out they were just in my head: for example, instead of the big enter key I had to use the numpad enter key etc.

Now that I've used mathematica on XFCE (4.3.99) it's working well. It also worked quite nicely on bare X, without any fancy desktop suite beneath..I still haven't fixed the mouse 2nd-button-click problem, nor made the first-button-click function completely well, but otherwise Mathematica is running fine (apart from the fact that I'm unable to scale any plottings).

I guess I'll see if numlock has anything to do with any of my problems..but the Gnome panel-problem is surely a Gnome-thing, since it's not doing so in any other desktop I've tried.

Hi,,

I am a new user of Ubuntu and I tried to install Mathematica 5.0 in it. When I run it, it shows me the same error as the user "gstgtfr" described. I followed the solution that he/she provided but it continues the same error.

What should I do?????

Thanks,

Bruno