Installation

The SourceForge repository contains several compiled versions of Reduce, including the complete sources for both Reduce and the underlying Lisp systems.

Compiled Versions

There are several compiled versions available for download. To obtain one of these, go to the project homepage at SourceForge, click on the "Files" link at the left of the page near the top. You will then see several instances of the available binaries. Please use the latest version if that meets your needs. Otherwise, click on the other links, and a variety of versions will be displayed. Hopefully one of these will meet your needs. The relevant files are there in some archive format suitable for your architecture. Among them should be a Reduce executable.

Compiling from Source

If none of the above versions meets your needs, or you are interested in a newer version containing the latest features, please download the complete source files and compile them yourself.

For this you need the "Subversion" program svn. If you don't have this, you will need to obtain it from somewhere. Once that is available, you can say

svn co http://svn.code.sf.net/p/reduce-algebra/code/trunk reduce-algebra

This will download all relevant files to a sub-directory reduce-algebra. To create the necessary executables, go

cd reduce-algebra

Depending on which underlying Lisp you want to have available, pick one of the following options:

./configure --with-csl

./configure --with-psl

You can configure for both of the Lisps, but you have to use separate configure commands for this.

Finally, type

make

After compilation a suitable executable redcsl or redpsl (with a .bat extension on Windows) will be found in the reduce-algebra/bin subdirectory.

There is no make install for installing things somewhere else in your file tree. We recommend to add reduce-algebra/bin to your PATH.

Required Packages for CSL Reduce Compilation on Linux

These are the Ubuntu packages, necessary for building CSL Reduce on Ubuntu 14.04:

• g++
• libx11-dev
• libxft-dev
• libxext-dev
• libncurses5-dev

So the required line before building is:

sudo apt-get install g++ libx11-dev libxft-dev libxext-dev libncurses5-dev

We expect other Linux distributions to be very similar about this.

Known Problems

Bugs and Bugfixes

The first and most important thing to say here is that if you have any problems, then please report them, e.g., via the SourceForge bug tracker. Unless we know exactly what problems are—and for choice have compact examples that reproduce them—we are not even liable to start trying to fix them! So the proper place to find a list of "Known Problems" is the Bug Tracker where (if you persist in working through the SourceForge interface) you can find all the bugs that have been reported to us since the Open Source release of Reduce was made, together with annotations showing the bugs that we believe have been fixed.

If you check out a full copy of Reduce from SourceForge or collect the source package, you should find a directory called "buglist" that contains some information about other issues. Some of these may in fact have been sorted out since, and our policy should be to migrate from a directory like this to the bug tracker.

Other queries from users will appear on the newsgroup or forum, so if you have a problem you may wish to check those to see if your problem is one that has arisen before (and if anybody has found a work-around).

If you are able to suggest a resolution to any bug or are interested in working on one of them, consider posting to the developer's forum.

Frontend-Related Issues

CSL Reduce comes with a FOX toolkit-based GUI. If you want to compile CSL Reduce without this GUI, then go

./configure --with-csl --without-gui

In this case you don't even need to install the packages libx11-dev, libxft-dev, and libxext-dev listed above. The option --without-gui is especially interesting if you have a purely "text-based" environment, e.g., in Cygwin or on a Linux server.

With CSL Reduce, there were some glitches with the mathematical prettyprinting of expressions in early releases, and some people view the exact spacing in the mathematical display as not being fully to their taste. Since it is relatively new code, there may be additional problems, but unless you report them they will not get looked at. If you need to turn this feature off while waiting for a resolution to some particular problem that you find you can say off fancy; in Reduce.

There are some keyboard problems with the CSL Reduce GUI on MacOS X with certain localized keyboards. It appears that many other X Window-based applications have had difficulty with the MacOS X server in the context of non-US keyboards, and so at present we do not have reason to believe that this is anything that can be sensibly corrected within Reduce! If you are having problems with CSL Reduce GUI, or generally prefer a command-line interface, you can run CSL Reduce in command-line mode via the option -w.

You might find that the command-line interface of both PSL and CSL Reduce is not very user-friendly. Consider using Redfront.

Version and Architecture-Related Issues

At present for a collection of reasons too messy to discuss here there are no PSL pre-built downloads provided via SourceForge. To obtain a PSL-based version of Reduce, you must compile it yourself as described above. You may of course check back with us every month or two to see if this situation has changed.

If you have a shared file-space and you connect to it from a variety of machines that have different architectures or that run different operating systems or operating system releases, then you may find it helpful to read the reduce-algebra/bin/README file that explains how it is arranged that for all the main parts of Reduce you can at least almost survive without having to put too much thought into the potential system clashes. The main trick is that you will need to run, e.g., bin/redpsl-s rather than bin/redpsl (etc.) and system startup will be marginally slower for you.

Redfront

Redfront is a terminal-based frontend for Reduce using the editline library, which is similar to the GNU readline. For compiling Redfront, go

cd reduce-algebra/generic/redfront
make install

After this, you will find suitable executables rfcsl and rfpsl in reduce-algebra/bin.