Installing

From the tarball: Once you downloaded pss5_pre_1.tar.gz, type:

tar -xvf pss5_pre_1.tar.gz

This will create a directory pss5_pre_1 under your current one. Move to that directory, and type:

autoreconf
./configure

This will check that all necessary libraries are available. Look carefully at the messages. If a library is missing, install it into your system and then run configure again.

After configuring, type:

make

This will produce a pss executable in the current directory. Enter superuser mode and type (from the same directory):

make install

This will install pss under the /usr/local hierarchy. Back to ordinary user mode, you should check that pss is in your PATH by typing:

pss

You should see:

pss - Polynomial System Solver 5 pre-release 1
Copyright (C) 2015 Gregorio Malajovich.
pss comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome
to redistribute it under certain conditions;
Type 'pss --license' for details.

No input provided. Type pss -h for help.

Also, try:

man pss

to check that the local manuals are in your MANPATH. If any of those fails, your need to setup environment variables PATH and MANPATH in your .profile file.

From the git server: enter the pss5 directory, then:

./autogen.sh

and run configure, make, make install as before.

For more information:
The INSTALL file contains generic options for the configure script.

./configure --help

will give you more options. For instance, you can install pss into your account by typing

./configure --prefix=/home/yourname

The README file contains more detailed instructions for installing and running pss.

The Maxima interface. Some versions of maxima are too old and you may want to install a new version from the source. You first need a lisp version that can work with linux pipes.
Those seem to be lisp(CMUCL), scl(SCL), sbcl(SBCL), lisp(ACL) and openmcl(OpenMCL). I tested cmucl (available only for i386 architectures) and sbcl.

Step by step installation:

1) Enter in superuser mode, enter aptitude or synaptic and remove packages maxima, wxmaxima and related.

2) Still inside the package manager, install the libalien-wxwidgets-perl package

Install also one of the lisp packages mentionned above.

su
cd /usr/local
tar -xvf ~gregorio/Downloads/cmucl-20f-x86-linux.tar.bz2 
exit

3) Download maxima from http://maxima.sourceforge.net

4) Download wxmaxima source from http://wxmaxima.sourceforge.net

5) Unpack:

tar -xvf Downloads/maxima-5.35.1.tar.gz
tar -xvf Downloads/wxmaxima-14.12.1.tar.gz

6) Install maxima:

cd maxima-5.35.1/
./configure

(Check the output to verify dependencies are OK)

make
su 
make install
exit

7) Install wxmaxima

cd wxmaxima-14.12.1/
./configure

(Check the output to verify dependencies are OK)

make
su
make install
exit

** Fweb installation **

Fweb is not available in all Linux distributions. Here is how to install it:

The source is available at http://w3.pppl.gov/~krommes/fweb.html

If it fails to compile, there are two things you should check.
In the file ratfor.c, comment out the deprecated definition

#ifdef NEVER
char * strpbrk;
#endif

In $Fweb$'s configure script, replace

termcap0."$O"

by

termcap0.o