GAP runs on a large number of different operating systems. It behaves slightly different on each of those. This chapter describes the behaviour of GAP, the installation, and the options on some of those operating systems.
Currently it contains instructions for UNIX (which includes the popular variant Linux), for Apple Macintosh computers under OS X (see GAP for Macintosh OS X) as well under the ``classic'' MacOS (see GAP for MacOS), and finally for Windows.
For other systems the section Porting GAP gives hints how to approach such a port.
To permit compatibility over a wide range of operating systems, the installation of GAP might differ from what you are accustomed to for you particular operating system. In particular, there is no ``Installer'' program.
Installing the GAP distribution alone takes about 150MB of disk space. The packages add another 100MB. (These are upper limits. Unix is more efficient in storing a large number of small files than Windows.) You also should have at least 64MB of memory to run GAP.
The installation consists of 5 easy steps:
Installation will always install the full version of GAP. There is no ``Upgrade'' mode. If you are worried about losing the old version, you can keep an existing installation of GAP in another directory, it will not be overwritten.
Section The Documentation contains information about the manual, where to find and how to print it. Section If Things Go Wrong lists common problems with the installation.
You can get archives for the GAP distribution from http://www.gap-system.org. As different operating systems use different archive formats, GAP is available in a variety of archives. These archives slightly differ in the treatment of text or binary files. If you get the wrong archive you might get error messages during compilation or not be able to look at text files in an editor.
If you use
.tar.gz, .tar.bz2 or .zoo archives.
.tar.gz or .zoo archives (or install the MacOS
version, see also GAP for Macintosh OS X).
.zoo archive. Also make sure you get the .sit StuffIt archives
for the unzoo uncompressor.
-win.zip or the .zoo archives.
Now get the installation archives of the right kind, according to your operating system. You want to get the archives:
gap4r4p7
packages4r4p7
unzoo.zoo archives: Unix and OS X users get the source code
unzoo.c, MacOS users get the .sit archive and Windows users
the .exe binary.
htmie4r4p7Internet Explorer that has difficulties with rendering Unicode
correctly, you might want to replace the HTML documentation with this
version. (See section The Documentation.)
xtom4r4p7Note that starting with release 4.4, the distribution archives for GAP will always contain the most recent bugfix. Thus if you install anew from scratch, you will not need to get any bugfixes.
The concrete act of unpacking will vary slightly, depending on the operating system and the type of archive used.
gap4r4p7 in whatever
place you want GAP to reside. If you use the .zoo archive, you will
have to compile the unzoo program first
cc -o unzoo -DSYS_IS_UNIX -O unzoo.c ./unzoo -x gap4r4p7.zoo
(If you unpack the archive as root user under UNIX, make sure that you
issue the command umask 022 before, to ensure that users will have
permissions to read the files.)
.sit archive did not extract autmatically, click it to force
extraction. You will end up with an applications,
unzoo 4.4 PPC.
Now move this applications, as well as the gap4r4p7.zoo
archive to the Folder in which you want to install GAP. Drag the archive
gap4r4p7.zoo onto the icon of `unzoo 4.4 PPC. You will get a
window with many lines of text output.
This process will create a folder gap4r4 in the current folder.
C: drive. (If
you do not have permissions or sufficient free space to create directories
there, see section Expert Windows installation.) If you use the .zoo
archives we provide move unzoo.exe and gap4r4p7.zoo in the
C: directory, open the MS-DOS (or Command Prompt) window. (You can
find this under ``Start/Programs/Accessories''.)
In this window issue the commands
cd c:\ unzoo -x gap4r4p7.zoo(It might be necessary to use upper case letters instead)
-win.zip archive use a ZIP extractor. Make sure
that you specify extraction to the c:/ folder (with no extra directory
name -- the directory is part of the archive) to avoid extraction in a wrong
place or in a separate directory. After extraction you can start GAP with
the file
C:\GAP4R4\bin\gapw95.exe
For the MacOS and Windows version the unpacking process will already have put binaries in place. Under Unix and OS X you will have to compile (OS X users please see section GAP for Macintosh OS X for information about compilation) such a binary yourself.
Go into the directory gap4r4 (which you just created by unpacking).
Issue the two commands
./configure makeBoth will produce a lot of text output. You should end up with a shell script
bin/gap.sh which you can use to start GAP. (If you want, you can
copy this script later to a directory that is listed in your search path.)
OS X users please note that this script must be started from within the
Terminal Application. It is not possible to start GAP by clicking this
script.
If you get weird error messages from these commands, make sure that
you got the Unix version of GAP (i.e. not the -win.zip format archive) and
that you extracted the archive on the machine on which you compile.
Also see section Known Problems of the Configure Process below for further
information.
If you use OS X in the ``Panther'' release (version 10.3), you might want to
change the call to make to
make COPTS="-fast -mcpu=7450"on a G4 system or to
make COPTS="-O3 -mtune=G5 -mcpu=G5 -mpowerpc64"on a G5 system (please note that the
-fast compiler option causes problems
on a G5 at the time of this writing -- February 2004). Initial tests
indicate that this will give you substantially improved performance.
Unless you want to use the same installation of GAP also under Windows or MacOS (not OS X), issue the command
make removewinto delete unnecessary files that are Windows-only and only take up about 2MB of space.
You are now at a point where you can start GAP for the first time. Unix and OS X users type
./bin/gap.shMacOS users click the Application
GAP 4 PPC in the gap4r4
directory, Windows users start
C:\GAP4R4\bin\gapw95.exeGAP should start up with its banner and after a little while give you a command prompt
>.
Try a few commands to see if the compilation succeeded.
gap> 2 * 3 + 4; 10 gap> Factorial( 30 ); 265252859812191058636308480000000 gap> m11 := Group((1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11),(3,7,11,8)(4,10,5,6));; gap> Size( m11 ); 7920 gap> Length( ConjugacyClasses( m11 ) ); 10 gap> Factors( 10^42 + 1 ); #I IsPrimeInt: probably prime, but not proven: 4458192223320340849 [ 29, 101, 281, 9901, 226549, 121499449, 4458192223320340849 ]
If you get the error message ``hmm, I cannot find lib/init.g'' you are
likely to have installed only the binary (or on Windows have not installed
GAP in the root directory of the C: drive).
If GAP starts but you get error messages for the commands you issued, the
files in the lib directory are likely to be corrupt or incomplete. Make
sure that you used the proper archive and that extraction proceeded without
errors.
Especially try the command line editing and history facilities, because
they are probably the most machine dependent feature of GAP. Enter a
few commands and then make sure that ctr-P redisplays the last
command, that ctr-E moves the cursor to the end of the line, that
ctr-B moves the cursor back one character, and that ctr-D deletes
single characters. So, after entering the above commands, typing
ctr-P ctr-E ctr-B
ctr-B ctr-B ctr-B ctr-D 2 return
should give the following lines:
gap> Factors( 10^42 + 2 ); #I IsPrimeInt: probably prime, but not proven: 3145594690908701990242740067 [ 2, 3, 433, 953, 128400049, 3145594690908701990242740067 ]
If you want to run a more thorough test (this is not required), you can read in a test script that exercises more of GAPs capabilities.
gap> Read( Filename( DirectoriesLibrary( "tst" ), "testall.g" ) );
The test requires about 60-70MB of memory and runs about 2 minutes on a Pentium III/1 GHz machine. You will get a large number of lines with output about the progress of the tests.
test file GAP4stones time(msec) ------------------------------------------- testing: /home/fac/a/hulpke/gap4/tst/zlattice.tst zlattice.tst 0 0 testing: /home/fac/a/hulpke/gap4/tst/gaussian.tst gaussian.tst 0 10 [ further lines deleted ]
Windows users should note that the MS-DOS/Command Prompt user interface provided by Microsoft might not offer history scrolling or cut and paste with the mouse. See section Expert Windows Installation for a way around this.
To extract the packages, extract the package4r4p7 archive in
the ``gap4r4/pkg' directory by the same method used to extracted
the main archive. (If you use unzoo or under MacOS move both the unzoo
binary and the archive in the pkg directory and extract there.)
For packages that consist only of GAP code no further installation is necessary. Some packages however contain external binaries that will require separate compilation. (If you use the MacOS version or Windows you will not be able to use external binaries anyhow any you can skip the rest of this section.) You can skip this compilation now and do it later -- GAP will work fine, just the capabilities of the affected packages won't be available.
In general, each package contains a README file that contains information
about the package and the necessary installation. Typically the installation
for a package consists of changing in the packages directory and issuing the
commands ./configure; make in the packages directory. (This has to be done
separately for exery package).
If you have problems with package installations please contact the package
authors as listed in the packages README file.
Congratulations, your installation is finished.
Once the installation is complete, we would like to ask you to send us a short note to support@gap-system.org, telling us about the installation. (This is just a courtesy; we like to know how many people are using GAP and get feedback regarding difficulties (hopefully none) that users may have had with installation.)
We also suggest that you subscribe to our GAP Forum mailing list; see
the GAP web pages for details. Whenever there is a bug fix or new
release of GAP this is where it is announced. The GAP Forum also
deals with user questions of a general nature; bug reports and other
problems you have while installing and/or using GAP should be sent to
support@gap-system.org.
At this point you can also delete all archive files. (You
might want to keep unzoo if you used it in case a bugfix will be
released.)
The directories trans, small and prim within gap4r4
contain data libraries. If you are short of disk space you can erase some of
them. Similarly, you can erase and any of the GAP package directories in
pkg that you have decided you don't need, but then of course you will not
be able to access these data or packages. (You should do this only if you
have diskspace problems as you might find out later that you need certain
packages.)
If you are new to GAP, you might want to read through the following two sections for information about the documentation.
The GAP manual is distributed in various ``books''. The standard
distribution contains four of them (as well as a comprehensive index).
GAP packages (see Chapter GAP Packages and, in particular,
Section Loading a GAP Package) provide their own documentation in
their own doc directories.
All documentation will be available automatically for the online help (see Section Tut:Help in the Tutorial and Chapter The Help System in this manual for more details).
There also is (if installed) an HTML version of some books that can be
viewed with an HTML browser, see Changing the Help Viewer. Some of these
use unicode characters for mathematical formulae. If your browser
is not able to display these (older versions of Internet Explorer do not),
get the htmie4r4p7 archive which provides math symbols in a
different encoding. (Mozilla, Konqueror and Safari all support unicode
characters.)
The manual is also available in pdf format.
In the full UNIX
distribution (gap4r4p7.zoo) these files are included in the
directory
gap4r4/doc in the
subdirectories tut (a beginner's tutorial), ref (the reference
manual), prg (programmer's tutorial), ext (programmer's
reference) and new (new material that might still change in future versions).
If you want to use these manual files with the online help you may check (or make sure) that your system provides some additional software like
xpdf
xdvi
xdvi archive
(after the main site name) is
tex-archive/dviware/xdvi/xdvi.tar.gz.
acroread
As a complete beginner, we suggest you read the tutorial first for an introduction to GAP 4. Then start to use the system with extensive use of the online help system (see Section Tut:Help in the Tutorial and Chapter The Help System in this manual).
If you have experience with GAP 3, it might be still worthwhile to at least glance over the first chapters of the tutorial. You however should read the last chapter of the tutorial, ``Migrating to GAP4''. This chapter gives a summary of changes between GAP 3 and GAP 4 that will affect the user. It also explains a ``compatibility mode'' you may turn on to make GAP 4 behave a bit more like GAP 3.
As some of the manuals are quite large, you should not immediately print them. If you start using GAP it can be helpful to print the tutorial (and probably the first chapters of the reference manual). There is no compelling reason to print the whole of the reference manual, better use the online help which provides useful search features.
This section lists a few common problems when installing or running GAP and their remedies. Also see the FAQ list on the GAP web pages at http://www.gap-system.org/Faq/faq.html
hmm, I cannot find 'lib/init.g'''.-l path where path is the path to the GAP home directory. See
section Command Line Options in the reference manual.
.gaprc file that was intended for GAP 3 but is not
compatible with GAP 4. See section The .gaprc file in chapter Running GAP of the reference manual.
corrupted completion file''.-N and see section Completion Files.
exceeded the permitted memory''.return; to continue, if the error message happens repeatedly you
better start the job anew and use the command line option -o to set a
higher memory limit.
cannot extend the workspace any more''.-g
(see section Command Line Options in the reference manual) to display how
much memory GAP uses. If this is below what your machine has available
extending the workspace is impossible.
Start GAP with more memory or use the -a option to
pre-allocate initially a large piece of workspace.
Depending on the operating system, it also might be necessary to compile the
GAP binary statically (i.e. to include all system libraries) to avoid
collisions with system libraries located by default at an address within the
workspace. (Under Linux for example, 1GB is a typical limit.)
You can compile a static binary using make static.
Windows users also see below for a built-in limit.
make complains about not being able to find files in cnf or src which exist.touch * cnf/* src/*from the main GAP directory (this ought to reset the date of all relevant files to ``now'') and try again.
touch (UNIX command to change date) the new files.
make clean and restart the configure / make process completely
from scratch. (It is possible that the operating system and/or compiler got
upgraded in the meantime and so the existing .o files cannot be used any
longer.
Problems specific to Windows
^-key or "-key cannot be entered.^ character to produce the French
circumflex accent and do not pass it properly to GAP.
No fix is known.
rxvt -- see Expert Windows Installation.
Also http://www.gap-system.org/Faq/Hardware-OS/hardware-os.html might give
a remedy.
cygwin1.dllIf all these remedies fail or you encountered a bug please send a mail to support@gap-system.org. Please give:
GAP4, Version: 4...when your GAP 4 starts up, supplies the information required).
If make complains ``Do not know how to make xyz'' but xyz is an
existing file, it is likely that the dates of the files were not
extracted properly (Alpha-OSF machines are prone to this). Call
touch * cnf/* src/*from the main GAP directory (this ought to reset the date of all relevant files to ``now'') and try again.
Sometimes the configure process does not properly figure out the
``inline'' compiler command. If you get error messages
that complain that ``inline'' is unknown, edit the file config.h in the
bin/target subdirectory and replace the line
/* #undef inline */by
#define inlineand then try to compile again.
The configure script respects compiler settings given in environment
variables. However such settings may conflict with the automatic
configuration process. If configure produces strange error messages about
not being able to run the compiler, check whether environment variables that
might affect the compilation (in particular CC, LD, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS
and C_INCLUDE_PATH) are set and reset them using unsetenv.
Some users reported problems with make, while the GNU version gmake
worked. Thus if problems occur you should try gmake instead
if it is installed on your machine.
The highest levels of optimization of the OSF/4 C compiler cc on the
Compaq alpha chip make assumptions about the use of pointers which are
not valid for GAP, and produce executables that can crash; -O3
seems to be safe, but -O4 and -fast are not.
On Sun and IRIX systems which are capable of running in 32 or 64 bit modes, it is possible to build a 64 bit version of GAP, but special procedures are needed (and, on Suns, a compiler bug must be circumvented). If you wish to compile on such a system, please send an email to support@gap-system.org.
Because of the large variety of different versions of UNIX and different
compilers it is possible that the configure process will not chose
best possible optimization level, but you might need to tell make about
it.
If you want to compile GAP with further compiler options (for example
specific processor optimizations) you will have to assign them to the variable
COPTS as in the following example when calling make:
make COPTS=-optionIf there are several compiler options or if they contain spaces you might have to enclose them by quotes to avoid depending on the shell you are using.
The configure process also introduces some default compiler
options. (See the Makefile in the bin directory for details.)
You can eliminate these by assigning the variable CFLAGS (which contains
the default options and COPTS) to the desired list of compiler options in
the same way as you would assign COPTS.
The recommended C compiler for GAP is the GNU C compiler gcc,
or a related compiler such as egcs. There are two reasons for this
recommendation: firstly we use gcc in GAP development and so this
combination has been far more heavily tested than any other and
secondly, we have found that it generally produces code which is
faster than that produced by other compilers.
If you do wish to use another compiler, you should remove
config.cache and config.status in the GAP root directory, set
the environment variable CC to the name of your preferred compiler
and then rerun configure and make. You may have to experiment to
determine the best values for CFLAGS and/or COPTS as described
above. Please let us (support@gap-system.org) know
the results of your experiments.
Porting GAP to a new operating system should not be very difficult. However, GAP expects some features from the operating system and the compiler and porting GAP to a system or with a compiler that do not have those features may prove very difficult.
The design of GAP makes it quite portable. GAP consists of a small kernel written in the programming language C and a large library written in the programming language provided by the GAP kernel, which is also called GAP.
Once the kernel has been ported, the library poses no additional problem, because all those functions only need the kernel to work, they need no additional support from the environment.
The kernel itself is separated into a large part that is largely operating system and compiler independent, and one file that contains all the operating system and compiler dependent functions. Usually only this file must be modified to port GAP to a new operating system.
Now let us take a look at the minimal support that GAP needs from the operating system and the machine:
You need enough main memory in your computer. The size of the GAP kernel varies between 1.5 and 2.5 MByte (depending on the machine). The GAP library additionally takes a minimum of 10MByte and the library of functions that GAP loads takes up another 1.5 MByte. So it is clear that at least 16 MByte of main memory are required to do any serious work with GAP.
Additionally, the GAP kernel needs a flat address space, that is all the memory is available in one contiguous chunk.
Note that this implies that there is no point in trying to port GAP to plain MS-DOS running on IBM PCs and compatibles. The version of GAP for IBM PC compatibles that we provide runs on machines with the Intel 80486, Pentium or beyond processor under 32-bit Windows. (This is also necessary, because, as just mentioned, GAP wants to view its memory as a large flat address space.)
Next let us turn to the requirements for the C compiler and its library.
As was already mentioned, the GAP kernel is written in the C language. We have tried to use as few features of the C language as possible. GAP has been compiled without problems with compilers that adhere to the old definition from Kernighan and Ritchie, and with compilers that adhere to the new definition from the ANSI-C standard.
Porting GAP to another UNIX should not be hard. You need some very basic understanding of C and UNIX. If you plan to port GAP to a non-UNIX system please contact support@gap-system.org.
The configuration script runs various tests to determine the configuration
of your system. It produces a file bin/architecture/config.h which
contains definitions according to the test results.
It might be, however, that the tests used don't produce on
your machine the results they are expected to or that further tests are
necessary. If this is the case the easiest way is to edit the config.h
script, remove all object files and call make in the bin/architecture
subdirectory. If you have to resort to changing or amending this file,
please tell us what had to be changed (mail to
support@gap-system.org). If you had to add further definitions
please also tell what properties of your system these defines represent.
If GAP compiles but crashes while reading the library or during a garbage collection with a bus error it is possible that the configuration script did not guess the permitted pointer alignment correctly. This value is stored in the line
#define C_STACK_ALIGN 2of
config.h. Increase the value to the next power of 2 ( ≤ 8) and
compile GAP anew.
There is still a Makefile in the src directory, but it is not used by
the configuration process any longer. As a last resort you might want to
try this file, but please still report your problems to support.
OS X, the new version of the Macintosh operating system, is built on top of a variant of Unix. Thus there are two ways to run GAP under this operating system.
The first way is simply to follow the instructions in section GAP for MacOS below and to run the binary we provide in the ``Classic'' environment.
The second way is to install the Unix version of GAP.
We recommend to use this (Unix) version because you will be able to use all
features of GAP as well as all packages. However for installation you might
need a basic knowledge of Unix.
Note also that the Unix version of GAP uses Unix style text files. (These
files differ from older style macintosh text files in that lines do not
contain a trailing CR character. Depending on what text editor you use
you might not be able to inspect GAP library files and potentially might
run into problems with program files you create if they contain strings that
go over several lines.)
The following are a couple of notes and remarks about this:
You will need a compiler. The gcc C compiler is not installed by default,
but is part of the ``Developer tools'' package. This package might be in an
installer package already on your system (look at the Installer folder
under Applications), if not you can get it for free from Apple by
registering as a developer. See http://developer.apple.com for details.
For the ``Panther'' release (10.3) of OS X, gcc is part of the ``XCode''
development tools which you should install.
To compile and run GAP you will have to open the Terminal application
and type the Unix command into its window. The Terminal application can
be found in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder.
GAP also will run in such a window.
The next thing to note is that you should get the Unix type GAP archives,
i.e. usually the tar archive, not the zip archive (You won't be able to
compile the program as given in the .zip archive).
(If you prefer to use the .zoo type archive over .tar you can use this
as well. However then you will need to use the Unix
version of unzoo, which you will need to compile first by the command
gcc -o unzoo -DSYS_IS_UNIX -O unzoo.cIf you use the Macintosh version of the
unzoo extractor, the text files
will be converted to MacOS format and you will have problems with the
compilation.)
Go (using the cd command in the terminal window) into the directory where
you want to install GAP, and copy the archives (and the unzoo program if
you want to use zoo) in this directory. Then extract the archive by
the command
tar zxvf gap4r4p7.tar.gz(respectively -- if you prefer
zoo --
gcc -o unzoo -DSYS_IS_UNIX -O unzoo.c ./unzoo -x gap4r4p7.zoo)
Then simply follow the Unix installation instructions to compile GAP.
This section contains information about GAP that is specific to the port of GAP for Apple Macintosh systems under MacOS (simply called GAP for MacOS below).
To run GAP for MacOS you need an Apple Macintosh with a Motorola M68020, M68030, or M68040 processor, or a Power Macintosh. The computer must have at least 16MByte of (physical) memory and a harddisk. For serious calculations, much more may be needed. The operating system must be System 7 or higher. GAP for MacOS runs under System X, however only in Classic Mode.
The section Copyrights describes the copyright as it applies to the executable version that we distribute. The section Installation of GAP for MacOS describes how you install GAP for MacOS.
Please refer to the relevant sections of Chapter Running GAP in the GAP reference manual (included with the GAP distribution for an overview over the features of GAP for MacOS.
Installing GAP under MacOS is fairly easy. First, decide into which
folder you want to install GAP 4.4.7.
GAP will be installed in a subfolder gap4r4 of this folder.
You can later move GAP to a different location.
Note that certain parts of the output in the examples should only be taken as rough outline, especially file sizes and file dates are not to be taken literally.
If you encounter problems please also see section If Things Go Wrong of this document.
Get the Mac-specific files described in Get the Archives, that is, the
distribution gap4r4p7.zoo and the binary archive
unzoo4r4-PPC.sit,
How you can get those files is described in the section Get the Archives. Remember that the distribution consists of binary files and that you must transmit them in binary mode.
If the sit files did not extract automatically click on them to extract
them. If even this fails use one of the standard
decompression utilities, such as Stuffit Expander.
After this process you should end up with two applications,
GAP 4 PPC and unzoo 4.4 PPC.
The latter is used to uncompress the .zoo archives which contain most of
GAP. The zoo archives we provide for GAP contain comments which indicate
whether files are text or binary files. The unzoo we provide uses these
comments. If you use another zoo extractor you might lose this information
and end up with files that contain text but cannot be opened as text files.
The following installation example assumes that you are installing GAP
in the folder Applications on a PowerPC Macintosh. (For a 68k Macintosh
you should replace all references to PPC to ones referring to 68K
Move the file gap4r4p7.zoo into the folder Applications
and drag it onto the icon of unzoo 4.4 PPC. You will get many lines of
output in this window.
This should have created a folder gap4r4 in the current folder.
(You will not need the file gap4r4p7.zoo any
longer. If you are short of disk space you can remove it now.)
If you got not the full distribution file but several small files, extract all of them (except the GAP packages!) in this way.
Move GAP 4 PPC and the bugfix file (if there is one) in the folder
gap4r4. Drag the bugfix file onto the icon of unzoo 4.4 PPC
to decompress it.
If you got any GAP packages, move them into the pkg folder in the folder
folder gap4r4 extract them there, in the same way as the bugfix.
After extraction you may discard all .zoo files if you are short of disk
space.
The folders trans, small and prim contain data
libraries. If you are short of disk space you can erase some of them and
any GAP package directories in the pkg directory that you don't need,
but then of course you will not be able to access these data and packages.
(Any GAP package that has a C code component is essentially UNIX-dependent
and you may as well delete those; such packages typically describe in their
README files that they require configure and make to complete their
installation or have a src directory.)
Before you use GAP, you should set up GAP's memory allocation, by
setting appropriate values by selecting the GAP application and
Get Info... in the Finder's File menu (in order to be able to
modify the values there, you have to do this before you launch GAP).
The maximum amount of workspace GAP can use depends on the amount of
memory the Finder allocates to GAP when it is launched. The maximum
amount of GAP workspace is this value, minus a certain amount used
internally by the GAP application (for the PPC
version, currently around 1.7 Megabytes, plus the size of the GAP
application if you do not use virtual memory, and 2.9 Megabytes for the
68K version), minus any additional amount set with the -a, -P or -W
command line options (see below).
You can find information about the amount of free GAP workspace, the total
amount of available workspace, and the remaining free memory,
by choosing About GAP in the Apple menu.
To ensure efficient operation, you should not allocate more memory to GAP than the amount of physical memory in your computer. If you are not using virtual memory, the amount may have to be considerably less (depending on your system and the number of other applications which you may want to run at the same time).
If you notice heavy disk use during garbage collections, this is a clear indication that you have allocated too much memory to GAP.
In order to test your installation now run the GAP application
by clicking on GAP 4 PPC.
You should get the GAP banner and then the GAP prompt in a window
titled GAP log. (The process of starting GAP may take a while.)
Try a few things to see if the installation succeeded.
gap> 2 * 3 + 4; 10 gap> Factorial( 30 ); 265252859812191058636308480000000 gap> Factors( 10^42 + 1 ); [ 29, 101, 281, 9901, 226549, 121499449, 4458192223320340849 ] gap> m11 := Group((1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11),(3,7,11,8)(4,10,5,6));; gap> Size( m11 ); 7920 gap> Length( ConjugacyClasses( m11 ) ); 10
A set of test files is provided, running them all probably takes some 40 minutes on a 200 MHz PPC machine. This is not a necessary part of the installation; it only serves as a confirmation that everything went OK. The full test suite takes some time and uses quite a bit of memory (around 70MB), so you may wish to skip this step or run only part of the tests. This does no harm.
Initially we must ensure that the print width of GAP is 80 characters per
line which we achieve with the SizeScreen command (otherwise we will be
swamped with error messages).
gap> SizeScreen([80,]);;
gap> Filename( DirectoriesLibrary("tst"), "testall.g" );
"./tst/testall.g"
gap> Read(last);
[many output lines omitted]
The information about the manual is system independent; you can find it in section The Documentation.
A few final reminders:
GAP Forum mailing list;
see the GAP web pages for details. Whenever there is a bug fix or new
release of GAP this is where it is announced. The GAP Forum also
deals with user questions of a general nature; bug reports and other
problems you have while installing and/or using GAP should be sent to
support@gap-system.org.
That's all, your installation should be complete. Please refer to Chapter Running GAP in the GAP reference manual for a description of some special features and options of GAP for MacOS.
We hope that you will enjoy using GAP. Remember, if you have problems, do not hesitate to contact us at support@gap-system.org. See Section If Things Go Wrong for what to include in a bug report.
This section decribes how to get a better shell for GAP and how to install GAP in another directory. These tasks are slightly complicated due to problems in the design of Windows, if you have not edited a batch file before you might want to contact your system administrator for help.
Some users report that the rxvt shell (see http://www.rxvt.org)
gives a better windows environment for cut/paste etc.
You can find a copy of this program in the bin subdirectory of the GAP
installation. Please note that this program is not part of the GAP
distribution and that we cannot offer any support for it. You can start
GAP under this program via the gaprxvt.bat script in the bin
subdirectory.
(The program has been tested only under a particular version of Windows98.
It might not work under other releases. It also might be necessary to adapt
paths in the batch file.) Under rxvt the standard Unix XWindows
cut-and-paste operations (left mouse button cuts, middle mouse button
pastes) work. After you terminate GAP a text window might stay on which
you can safely delete.
If you decide to install GAP in another directory than C: you can do so,
but you will have to edit a batch file and use this file to start GAP.
First unpack the GAP distribution in the directory you want.
Lets suppose you want GAP to reside in the directory
C:\MY PROGRAMS\GAPExtract GAP (as described in the previous section for
C:) in this
directory. (alternatively, you can also first unpack it in
C:\GAP4R4test it there first, and afterwards move it in the desired location.)
You now will have to edit the provided batch file, that will be used to start GAP.
This batch file is needed, since GAP otherwise will not find its library
directories. The file sits in the bin directory of the GAP
distribution, i.e. in our example
C:\MY PROGRAMS\GAP\GAPGAP4R4\bin\gap.batThis file should contain the following single line (which might be broken over in several lines in this manual as the page width is limited):
"C:\MY PROGRAMS\GAP\GAPGAP4R4\bin\gapw95.exe" -m 14m -l "C:\MY PROGRAMS\GAP\GAPGAP4R4" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8
You now should be able to start GAP by clicking this gap.bat file.
If you also want to use rxvt you have to edit the gaprxvt.bat file to
take care of the changed path in two places for the GAP binary as well as
for the GAP library.
By default, the ``cygwin'' environment we use limits a programs workspace to 128MB of memory. To increase this limit, it is necessary to edit the Windows registry.
WARNING: Editing the registry is the Windows equivalent of open heart surgery. Do not attempt this change if you have no previous experience in doing this. The web page http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-maxmem.html gives further details.
Before changing the entries, you might have to run GAP once first to create the appropriate registry keys.
The shell script usemem.bat in the bin directory sets a registry entry
/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Cygnus Solutions/Cygwin/heap_chunk_in_mbto decimal 1024.
If you prefer to do the change by hand, open regedit and
go to the Cygwin Key listed above. Then choose new value and add
heap_chunk_in_mb. Modify it to contain decimal 1024.
In addition to the general copyright for GAP set forth in the Copyright the following terms apply to the versions of GAP for Windows and MacOS.
The executable of GAP for Windows that we distribute was compiled with
the gnuwin32 compiler of the cygwin package.
This compiler can be obtained by anonymous ftp from a
variety of general public FTP archives. Many thanks to the Free Software
Foundation and RedHat Software for this amazing piece of work.
The GNU C compiler is
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The Cygwin32 API library is also covered by the GNU GPL. The executable we provide is linked against this library (and in the process includes GPL'd Cygwin32 glue code). This means that the executable falls under the GPL too, which it does anyhow.
The cygwin1.dll, libW11.dll, rxvt.exe and regtool.exe binaries are
taken unmodified from the Cygwin distribution. They are copyright by RedHat Software
and released under the GPL. You can find more information about cygwin under
http://www.cygwin.com. You also will be able to obtain the sources for cygwin from this place.
The system dependent part of GAP for MacOS was written by Burkhard
Höfling (his email address is
b.hoefling@tu-bs.de). He assigns
the copyright to the GAP group. Many thanks to Burkhard for his help!
Burkhard Höfling's port was partly based on an earlier
port of GAP for the Mac,
which was done by Dave Bayer (dab@math.columbia.edu)
and used the
Mac Programmers Workshop (MPW) compiler. Many thanks to Dave for his work.
Moreover, the built-in editor is based upon the freeware text editor
PlainText by Mel Park which, in turn, uses TE32K, a TextEdit
replacement by Roy Wood. It also uses Internet Config.
For technical reasons we do not distribute the Macintosh specific source and project files as part of the standard archives. If you are interested in compiling GAP yourself, we are happy to provide you with the appropriate files (contact us at support@gap-system.org). The source can be compiled with CodeWarrior Pro 5 with Apple's Universal Headers 3.3 installed.
Please contact the author b.hoefling@tu-bs.de or support@gap-system.org if you need further information.
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GAP 4 manual
March 2006