ActiveMath Installation

---

Installation instructions for Windows are  here.

License agreement

Please immediately make sure you agree with the legal conditions under which this program is provided to you.

System requirements

The current distribution of ActiveMath is made only for a Java virtual machine version 1.5 or higher.
You also need to setup a CAS (Computer Algebra System).
The shells /bin/sh and /bin/tcsh are used by all the unix shell scripts that will be used.

Unpacking

Unpack the archive. e.g.tar xfz activemath-1.0-bin.tgz. It will create a subdirectory called activemat-1.0. Note that a GNU-compatible tar is needed, this may mean, on Solaris, to invoke gtar.

Running first installation

Change your directory to the directory called activemath-1.0 that was created by the archive extraction.

Make sure that you have a pre-compiled version: Does the directory activemath/lib exist? And does the file activemath.jar exist in this directory? If not, go to the activemath/bin directory and start ant.

Setting up a CAS

In order to run interactive exercises with ActiveMath, you need to setup a CAS (Computer Algebra System). 

Adding Content

The distributions of ActiveMath come configured with no content except the official OpenMath content dictionaries (in OMdoc version, contained in omdoc1/cd).
A little bit of content is included though:

• The ActiveMath content examples are in omdoc1/exampleSrc They are meant to provide a little set of examples guiding authors to illustrate the encoding of items.
• Examples for interactive exercises are found in omdoc1/exercises_pool.

Each of these content collections has a Content-descriptor, a properties file that describes which OMDocs should be loaded, which presentation to use, and which books they contain, these files all start with the prefix ContentDescr_ and end up with .properties. One can use the content-collection within ActiveMath by putting a symbolic link to the content-decscriptor into the conf directory. For example, to use the ActiveMath content examples:

    cd conf
    ln -s ../omdoc1/examplesSrc/ContentDescr_Examples.properties

After adding a content descriptor, you need to update the content and search index:

    bin/buildIndex

(This will build the content database, as well as the search index for the Search module. It can take quite some time, depending on the size of your content.)

More information about writing your own documents is sketched in the bundled authoring tools page and in the somewhat too old Authoring Comments.

Configuration

The package delivered here has been made to run with all components concentrated on one machine.

You now have to make sure the ports 8080, 8005 and 27000 and  of your machine are free. You can do this using by directing your browser to these ports (e.g., http://localhost:27000) and detecting weather it responds connected or not. If the response is 'Connection refused' then everything is fine.

By editing conf/server.xml, you'll be able to adjust the ports 8080 (the http connection port) and 8005 (the Tomcat shutdown port).

Browsing conf/ActiveMath-properties will reveal you a lot of the functionalities and possible configurations.
It is advised that you don't change conf/ActiveMath.properties. Instead, copy the required properties to  conf/ActiveMath-individual.properties which overrides all the setting in the previous file.

If you want PDF or SVG output, you need to configure ActiveMath so that it finds the latex and pdflatex programs. Read conf/ActiveMath.properties and add the necessary properties in conf/ActiveMath-individual.properties.

You can now proceed to the How to run instructions.

---