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3. Troubleshooting


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3.1 Cannot connect to Maxima

Since maxima (the program that does the actual mathematics) and wxMaxima (providing the easy-to-use user interface) are separate programs that communicate by the means of a local network connection the most probably case is that this connection is somehow not working. For example a firewall could be set up in a way that it doesn’t only prevent against unauthorized connections from the internet (and perhaps to intercept some connections to the internet, too) but also to block inter-process-communication inside the same computer. Note that since maxima is being run by a lisp processor the process communication is blocked from does not necessarily have to be named “maxima”. Common names of the program that opens the network connection would be sbcl, gcl, ccl or similar instead.

On Un*x computers another possible reason would be that the loopback network that provides network connections between two programs in the same computer isn’t properly configured.


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3.2 How to save data from a broken .wxmx file

Internally most modern xml-based formats are ordinary zip-files with one speciality: the first file in the archive is stored uncompressed and provides information about what type of program can open this file.

If the zip signature at the end of the file is still intact after renaming a broken ‘.wxmx’ file to ‘.zip’ most operating systems will provide a way to extract any portion of information that is stored inside it. The can be done when there is the need of recovering the original image files from a text processor document. If the zip signature isn’t intact that does not need to be the end of the world: If wxMaxima during saving detected that something went wrong there will be a ‘wxmx~’ file whose contents might help and even if there isn’t such a file: If the configuration option is set that ‘.wxmx’ files have to be optimized for version control it is possible to rename the ‘.wxmx’ file to a ‘.txt’ file and to use a text editor to recover the file’s contents.


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3.3 wxMaxima waits forever for data from maxima

This might be caused by the fact that a closing brace, bracket, parenthesis or hyphenation mark is missing: In this case maxima waits until it gets the rest of its input. If that isn’t the case the operating system normally provides a way to see if maxima is actually really working forever trying to solve the current problem.


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3.4 Outputting animations doesn’t work

wxMaxima relies on a third-party tool (ImageMagick) to convert animations to the animated gif format. This will obviously only work if this package is installed and known to the system (on windows the path to ImageMagick’s ‘convert.exe’ has to be part of the PATH system variable to make the system find it).

Another possible reason of not getting an animated gif is that this image would exceed the format’s (or ImageMagick’s) capabilities:


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3.5 Plotting only shows an closed empty envelope with an error message

This means that wxMaxima was unable to read the file maxima was supposed to instruct gnuplot to create.

Possible reasons that might cause this are:


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3.6 Plotting an animation results in “error: undefined variable”

The value of the slider variable by default is only substituted into the expression that is to be plotted if it is visible there. Putting an ev() around this expression should resolve this problem.


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3.7 I lost a cell contents and undo doesn’t remember

If you still have a way to find out what label maxima has assigned to the cell just type in the cell’s label and it’s contents will reappear. If you don’t: Don’t panic. In the “maxima” menu there is a way to show a history pane that shows all maxima commands that have been issued recently.

If nothing else helps maxima contains a replay feature:

 
%i1 playback();

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3.8 wxMaxima starts up with the message “Maxima process Terminated.”

One possible reason is that maxima cannot be found in the location that is set in the “maxima” tab of wxMaxima’s configuration dialog and therefore won’t run at all. Setting the path to a working maxima binary should fix this problem. If it doesn’t the command wxmaxima_debug_dump_output (that does still work if maxima isn’t connected) might give some hints to the problem.


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3.9 File I/O from maxima doesn’t work on Windows

On windows File I/O isn’t relative to the directory of the current file by default. If you store the maxima file on the drive wxMaxima is installed to setting wxchangedir to true will fix that for load, read_list, batch, read_matrix, save and all similar commands.

Setting this variable to true might have a drawback, though: Maxima knows which directory it is installed in and will search for any additional package that is requested by a load command in this directory, too. But it might not know which drive it is installed on. If wxchangedir is true and the current file is saved on a different drive than the one maxima is installed on maxima therefore might fail to load the additional packages it was bundled with.


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3.10 Input sometimes is sluggish/ignoring keys on Ubuntu

Installing the package ibus-gtk should resolve this issue. See (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wxwidgets3.0/+bug/1421558) for details.


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This document was generated by Andrej Vodopivec on April 24, 2015 using texi2html 1.82.