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4 Installation

Sections

  1. Getting and installing KASH
  2. Installing this package
  3. Adjust the path of the executable for KASH
  4. Loading and testing the package

This package provides an interface between GAP 4 and KANT respectively KASH, the shell of the computational algebraic number theory system KANT. By now the interface can only be used on a Linux system. KASH itself is not part of this package. It has to be obtained and installed independently of this package. Alnuth works with KASH version 2.4 or higher.

4.1 Getting and installing KASH

KASH is available at smallskip centerlinettwww.math.tu-berlin.de/simkant/download.html smallskip Note that you have to download two files for a complete installation of KASH. For the installation of version 2.5 of KASH on a Linux system you would do the following steps: parindent=25pt

  • Download the files kash_2.5.common.tar.gz and kash_2.5.3.linux.tar.gz into the same directory on your system.

  • Unpack the files using tar. This will create a directory KASH_2.5 containing among other files the KASH executable called kash. smallskip The place where KASH is located in your system is independent of the place where the Alnuth-package is installed.

    4.2 Installing this package

    This package is available at smallskip centerlinetthttp://www.icm.tu-bs.de/ag_algebra/software/assmann/Alnuth

    in form of a gzipped tar-archive or as an uncompressed tar-archive.

    There are two ways of installing the package. If you have permission to add files to the installation of GAP 4 on your system you may install the Alnuth-package into the pkg subdirectory of the GAP installation tree. If you do not have the permission to do that you may install the Alnuth-package in your private area. In the latter case you need to have a directory named pkg in your private area (for details see Installing a GAP Package in the reference manual).

    Now move the alnuth.tar.gz of alnuth.tar file into the directory pkg and unpack it:

        bash> tar xfz alnuth.tar.gz        # for the gzipped tar-archive
        bash> tar xf alnuth.tar         # for the uncompressed tar-archive
    

    4.3 Adjust the path of the executable for KASH

    The package needs to know where the executable for KASH is. Again there are several possibilities. If you are able to edit the file pkg/alnuth/defs.g you can change the line

        BindGlobal( "KANTEXEC", fail );
    
    to something like
        BindGlobal( "KANTEXEC", "mykash/kash -l mykash/lib" );
    
    where ttmykash needs to be replaced with the directory where kash was installed.

    Like always you can also change your personal .gaprc file (see The .gaprc file) for setting the variable KANTEXEC to a proper value. To do this add the command line mentioned above to .gaprc.

    The other alternative is to change the path to the executable within GAP using one of the following two functions. To do this you first have to load the package (see Loading and testing the package). To use

  • SetKantExecutablePermanently( path )

    where the string path should be the filename of the executable for KASH, you need to be allowed to overwrite the file pkg/alnuth/defs.g to make this work. It changes the file pkg/alnuth/defs.g as described above.

  • SetKantExecutable( path )

    changes the filename of the executable for KASH to the string path for the current session.

    Both functions run a test wether path is a valid string for a filename of an executable for KASH version 2.4 or higher.

    4.4 Loading and testing the package

    To use this package you have to request it explicitly. This is done by calling

        gap> LoadingPackage("alnuth");
        Loading Alnuth 1.0 ...
        true
        gap>
    
    Once the package is loaded, it is possible to check the correct installation by running the test suite of the package.

        gap> Read( "DIR/pkg/alnuth/tst/testall.g" );
    
    where DIR needs to be replaced with the directory, in which pkg is located.

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    ALNUTH manual
    February 2005