I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on an AMD Athlon64-X2 (AMD64), and found that "xmaple" did not work right out-of-the-box when I first got Maple 12. There was a bunch of error messages in the terminal I started it from regarding lock assertions or libraries not found, printed by the X-Windows libraries. I also had the problem where it won't print via CUPS.

The first thing I tried was to move aside the included JVM, then symlink to the Sun Java 6 installed via Synaptic. That worked fairly well, starting with no errors, but printing still did not work right and it ran very slowly. When I'd click on a help topic, for instance, it would take over 15 seconds to open the tree or find the page. Working with xmaple was very frustrating under those conditions.

What I finally did was to Google for "IBM Java", and download the latest version in TGZ format, and installed it like this:

% cd /usr/lib/jvm
% sudo tar xzf ~/Desktop/ibm-java-sdk-6.0-2.0-linux-x86_64.tgz
% sudo chown -R root:root ibm-java-x86_64-60
% cd ibm-java-x86_64-60
% sudo find -name '*.so' -exec chmod -x \{\} \;
% cd ~/maple12
% mv jre.X86_64_LINUX jre.X86_64_LINUX.aside
% ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/ibm-java-x86_64-60 jre.X86_64_LINUX
% cd ~
% export IBM_JAVA_OPTIONS='-Xcompressedrefs -Xgcpolicy:gencon -Xshareclasses'

I also edited my shell startup file to add that "export" statement so that it will persist in future login sessions. Xmaple now runs quickly and is very nice to use, and I can print. I think that the text anti-aliasing works a little better as well, making the interface easier to read.

Karl Hegbloom <karl.hegbloom@utah.edu>