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Maple 10 (network) and Fedora 5

Posted on 2006-08-02 13:14 By cooch (3)
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I recently installed Fedora Core 5 (64-bit) on a new multi-pro server (AMD Opteron chips) that my colleagues and I are planning to use for some of our research work. One of our preferred applications is Maple. We recently site licesned a netwrok version of Maple 10, and proceeded to start the process of installing it on our new machine. In advance, I googled 'Fedora 5' and 'Maple', and discovered that a lot of folks have had problems with the installer .bin becuase the installer tries to set the environment variable

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1

Well, news flash for Maplesoft - more and more kernels no longer support this bakcwards compatability (including RHEL 5, and Fedora Core 5, and I'll guess Suse 10, and a lot of other distros using the 2.6.x kernel).

OK, smart folks figured out you can edit the installer .bin (which is a compiled script), and comment out the export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL lines.

Fine, did that - and Maple installed just fine - all the directories were created, binaries looked like the right size.

Great right? Editing .bin worked right?

Well, perhaps this is a viable trick for single-user Maple, but if you're installing a networked, multi-user version, hang on - you still need to load the license manager daemon.

You read the docs, and what do you find? On 64-bit Linux platforms, you *must* use LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1. And, because the program that starts the daemon (lmgrd) isn't editable, you're "hosed".

In other words, Maple 10 network version cannot be used on *any* Linux distro that (i) uses 2.6.x kernel, and (ii) has deprecated LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1. And this includes Redhat, which is a fairly big player in the Linux scene.

So, any comment (suggestion) from Maplesoft on what to do?

‹ Why should I have to re-execute to get a result? Creating PDF Documents ›

further

Comment on 2006-08-02 13:39 from cooch (3)

I also looked at the release notes for RHEL4, which confirms that the old Posix Threads library is still supported (LD_ASSUME_KERNEL relates to the threading model used - in other words, LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 *is* currently supported in RHEL and FC4), but will be removed in the next release. From the RH website:


While support for LinuxThreads still exists for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, this statement serves as advance notice that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will no longer include support for LinuxThreads. Therefore, applications that require LinuxThreads support must be updated before they will be able to work properly on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system.

In otherwords, Maple 10 will *not* function on current releases of Fedora, and won't on the next release of Redhat Enterprise (biggest copororate player on the block). Time for Maplesoft to cut the chord on the 2.4.1 kernel, and compile for 2.6.x

Otherwise...

official Maplesoft reply

Comment on 2006-08-02 16:24 from cooch (3)

which I was just emailed:

We thank you for contacting Maplesoft and we appreciate your comments. The 64-bit Linux distributions that Maple 10 has been tested with, and therefore the distributions that we provide support for, are SUSE 9.0, Red Hat Enterprise 2.1 and Red Hat Enterprise 3.0. For a complete list of currently supported operating systems please refer to our website:

http://www.maplesoft.com/products/maple/systemreq/

We are aware of the changes that have been made to the latest Linux distributions. With these changes in mind we have compiled a list of platforms under which future releases of Maple will be supported:

http://www.maplesoft.com/futureplatforms.aspx

Personal note: dumb list - RHEL 5 - just about to be released - is not supported. Only platforms that support ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 are supported. A big mistake - pretty soon that list is going to be so small as to be laughable.

Though we do not officially support Maple 10 running on your chosen distribution of Linux, we do try to offer suggestions to users who wish to try running Maple on these unsupported platforms. The workaround you mention below does appear to have allowed Maple 10 to be installed successfully. However, there is no workaround that will allow you to run the FLEXlm license manager with our maplelmg vendor daemon on Fedora Core 5. You should still be able to run Maple 10 on your machine, but you will need to choose another computer to use as your FLEXlm license manager. Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Change of heart? - New licence manager now available

Comment on 2007-01-16 16:13 from pspencer (1)

I'm posting this for the benefit of anyone else encountering this thread (like me) and thinking Maple is a lost cause on newer kernels.

We were bitten by this problem after upgrading our old RedHat 9-based infrastructure to a new Fedora Core 6-based one. As we are part of a site licence installation at a major university, I asked our site licensing officer to raise the issue with her contacts at MapleSoft. This was a week ago.

I finally heard back from them and the good news is that they have now built an updated version of the maplelmg licence manager daemon. To use it, you need to be running a current (>= 9.5) version of the FlexLM -- now called Flexnet -- lmgrd daemon. (We happened to already be running the latest (10.8) version, but for anyone who's not, it is freely downloadable at http://www.macrovision.com/support/by_category/lmgrd.shtml).

The new maplelmg works fine for us under Fedora Core 6 (though the workaround described elsewhere in this thread is still required to get the installer program to run).

So, for anybody else having this problem: you can probably submit a support request to Maplesoft and ask them to send you the updated maplelmg. It does exist!

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