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dave559
Asked: 2020-05-23 03:45:03 +0800 CST

How to install Maxima CLI-only in Ubuntu 20.04?

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I am attempting to install Maxima on Ubuntu 20.04 (on a headless server for use programmatically), but, unlike previous releases which had the graphical interface as a separate additional package, the maxima package in this release now seems to bring in a large number of X and Gnome dependencies.

Is there a way that I can install only the packages needed for the command line version of Maxima, as I would prefer not to bring in a whole X environment on to a headless server unnecessarily?

package-management apt 20.04

1 Answers

  1. You can take more control on Maxima installation by using special options to specify that you do not want to get recommended and suggested dependencies:

    sudo apt-get install maxima --no-install-suggests --no-install-recommends

    For example on minimal 20.04 LTS installation it will result in:

    Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
  texmacs maxima-doc xmaxima maxima-emacs wish
Recommended packages:
  maxima-share gnuplot-x11
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  maxima
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 6928 kB of archives.
After this operation, 53.5 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 maxima amd64 5.43.2-3 [6928 kB]
Fetched 2494 kB in 1s (3163 kB/s) 
Selecting previously unselected package maxima.
(Reading database ... 62984 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../maxima_5.43.2-3_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking maxima (5.43.2-3) ...
Setting up maxima (5.43.2-3) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...

    Analyzing the above output we can see that gnuplot-x11 may be a reason to install X11 stuff.

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