Maxima does not start on Sierra

Question

I downloaded and installed the latest Ma version of Maxima from source forge. When I try to launch it, I get “Maxima.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash. This happens with both available versions, the one with VTK and the one without VTK. How can I get it running? I have MacOS 10.12.6 and both versions are here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima/files/Maxima-MacOS/5.40.0-MacOSX/

Answer 1

Others have run into the same problem. I don't use MacOS so I'm not sure what the problem is. Anyway, take a look at this bug report: #3316: Maxima VTK for Mac 5.40 is corrupt. The person who submitted it reported they got it working by following the advice in the comments.

Answer 2

See also thread 39: https://sourceforge.net/p/maxima/support-requests/39/ This is a really important thread to the larger MacOS community. I have a MacBook Pro running OS X El Capitan, which is locked down a few versions back from the current MacOS Mojave. I spent an entire night trying to get every wxMaxima from 5.36 to 5.42 running without success - even compiling from sources. In desperation I found the thread 39 and entered the line: (setf sb-impl::default-external-format :utf-8) into a ~home/.sbclrc file (/Users/myName/.sbclrc). It was only then that the GUI and the Maxima engine could connect and a normal session could be established. Maxima, its maintainers and its users are too important a world resource to be stymied by such an esoteric and non-obvious bug. A user encountering this bug will first go into the preferences menu and start trying to make sure that the file addresses and port numbers are correct, but experimentation can corrupt these and lead to other problems.

Answer 3

In my case following excerpt from https://sourceforge.net/p/maxima/mailman/message/35910588/ helped:

(0) Double-click the icon of "Terminal.app" in the folder "/Applications/Utilities", then the command-line-user-interface window is opened.

(1) Move the current working directory to the location of the disc image with the command "cd". (e.g. "Downloads" folder)

$ cd $HOME/Downloads

(2) You can check the attribute with the command "ls -l@": (You will be able to find "com.apple.quarantine" which is the name of the attribute.)

$ ls -l@ ./*.dmg

-rw-r--r--@ 1 name  staff  471227521  6 24 23:17 ./Maxima-5.40.0-VTK-macOS.dmg
             com.apple.quarantine               62

(3) Remove the attribute "com.apple.quarantine" with the command "xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./*.dmg":

$ xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./Maxima-5.40.0-VTK-macOS.dmg

(4) Verify that the attribute "com.apple.quarantine" was removed:

$ ls -l@ ./*.dmg

-rw-r--r--  1 name  staff  471227521  6 24 23:17 ./Maxima-5.40.0-VTK-macOS.dmg

(5) Double-click the icon of the disc image file to open.

After that, you should install Maxima.app into your "Applications" folder ("/Applications"). And you should drag the Launchers icon from the disc image to another place of your filesystem. You can install launchers to anywhere you like. Then you will be able to launch Maxima with Maxima.app or launchers.