I do not complain about changes in the Plugin interface. My impression was that the required changes were inextensive and well documented. We had to apply them because we use the insert menu as launcher for the control windows.

There were major changes under the hood of the Maxima plugin, which by end of last year reached the stability and maintainability of "a house of cards" (in Kay's words). Still the design is based on string translations using regular expressions. I wish we had the resources to shift that towards a better performing strategy.

Just let us consider the Maxima Plugin as concept demonstration for how it would feel if SMath was a computer algebra system with a versatile plot function and a smart document concept (the last already given). For real life applications it is too slow (try plotting a matrix of more than some hundred data points with Draw2D).

I'd be happy to see the plugin obsolete some day, when there is reliable internal implementations of these features.

Edited by user 12 February 2014 01:04:43(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

We have never testet this (I do not have a working linux environment at hand).
If the problems are just due to the control windows, we might be able to generate a windows-free version.

As a first test I recommend that you replace the current maxima directory under extensions/plugin with the contents of the attached zip file. This is an early version without control windows but with other bugs than the current version. Tested under Windows with 0.96.4909 but might work with the current version as well.

If that works than it might be possible to provide a linux version. But we definitely would need patient testers.

Hello Martin,

Nice thing with the plot files naming. Thank you

By the way I realized that Maxima(Solver..) will not recalculate like Maxima(Solve...) if we change something in the region. Actually, MaximaControl(restart) should be in front of Maxima(load(Solver)...I figured out then that enabling-disabling MaximaControl(restart) will force Solver to recalculate - see this video please.

By the way, I can not understand how Solve() worked in your example. I should use Maxima(Solve(...

Regards,
Radovan

Edited by user 25 February 2014 02:02:52(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Thank you Martin,

I think you just confirmed what I was thinking about. This will be - If you use some package with Maxima(load..., than using MaximaControl(restart) downstream will cause the package to be removed and can not be used anymore. I just used your file, and if the recalculation did not happen after editing Maxima(Solver... region, the remedy will be just to do few times the appropriate enable-disable Maxima(load... region.

About Solve(..., - my mistake. I did not check the optimization after opening your file. It was set to Numeric but I did not change a thing (strange!). Never mind, I should have checked that, sorry.

Regards,
Radovan

Seems that you need to update the plugin. The previous version always expected a file name as second argument of Draw2D/3D.

With the path separators I never had a problem. In Maxima, both types should work. If there are problems, please give examples including the log contents (Insert> Maxima> Log)

Can you try the attached example file? You can remove the snapshot regions. Some of the plots do not work here either.

See the german pdf handbook for what the plots should look like (extension manager-> handbooks)

Edited by user 26 February 2014 00:27:00(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi Igor,
the first two plots shown should in principle work, the third plot shows the same error message as on my system. There is some problem with the function polar() in the interface.

The log message for the second plot looks fine, there should be a file of the name specified in your system. Try to search for it.

Maybe, there is a path issue? Try to add CurrentDirectory(DocumentDirectory("")= to the sheet. Or try to launch it by clicking the sm file and alternatively, opening the file from a running system. Any differences?

Can you please send the log file contents? (Insert> Maxima> Log)

You need to use Maxima 5.31.1-1. That is the most recent version where the draw package works from within the Maxima plugin. I shall add that hint to the topic starter post and to the interactive book.

Also when switching Maxima versions, you need to clear the binary-gcl directory (in your user directory, search for the dir name), because the object files are not compatible between Maxima versions but share the same location and names.

Currently there is no alternative. Either you switch to 5.31.1-1 or you can't use the draw package via SMath.

I cannot reproduce the problem in wxmaxima, thus obviously it is related to the plugin rather than to Maxima. I once asked in the maxima forum if they have an idea what changes from 5.31.1-1 to 5.31.2 could cause compilation problems when loading the draw package via socket connection, but got no answer. May be, some future version will work again, just by chance. Perhaps one has to be able to make a windows built of Maxima in order to identify the cause fo the problem. This currently is beyond my ambitions.