GAP for Debian -------------- GAP (https://www.gap-system.org) provide a lot of extra component, most of them are not packaged yet. However, care has been taken so that you can locally install them either: * in /usr/local/share/gap or /usr/local/lib/gap. * in ~/gap. Note they must usually be put in a sub-directory called pkg. For example, the FactInt package provide a factint directory that must be moved to ~/gap/pkg/factint. To compile some of them, you will need to install the gap-dev package. Since GAP can provide new packages at random time, I cannot garantee it will work, but if it is not possible to install a package, I will be glad if you told me about the problem. Saved Workspaces, or How to make GAP start faster ------------------------------------------------- GAP start slowly because it needs to parse all the libraries installed at start up. To make GAP start faster, it is possible to save the GAP workspace and reload it at next start up. To that effect, Debian provides a script 'update-gap-workspace', see the update-gap-workspace(1) manual page. Colors in the GAP shell ----------------------- If you would like the GAP shell to use color to display color for prompt, input, etc., you can try colorprompt.g by Frank Luebeck. Just enter ColorPrompt(true); at the GAP prompt. Read /usr/share/gap/lib/colorprompt.g for more information. Browsing GAP Documentation -------------------------- If you prefer nicely typeset documentation, you can use xpdf to display the GAP online help. Make sure xpdf is installed and issue the command SetHelpViewer("xpdf"); at the gap prompt. Large GAP libraries are compressed ---------------------------------- To save diskspace, the largest GAP libraries are gzip'ed. GAP automatically uncompress them while reading them. Supporting GAP -------------- If you use GAP, please send a short note to support@gap-system.org stating you use the Debian packages of GAP so the GAP team can keep track of the number of GAP users. This helps them obtaining funding for the project. -- Bill Allombert Wed, 12 Jan 2005 13:56:53 +0100