The GAP 4 package `Alnuth' ========================== This package provides an interface between GAP 4 and KANT respectively KASH, the shell of the computational algebraic number theory system KANT. By now the interface can only be used on a Linux system. KASH itself is not part of this package. It has to be obtained and installed independently of this package. Alnuth works with KASH version 2.4 or 2.5. Getting and installing Kash =========================== KASH is available at http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~kant/download.html Note that you have to download two files for a complete installation of KASH. For the installation of version 2.5 of KASH on a Linux system you would do the following steps: --- Download the files kash_2.5.6.common.tar.gz and kash_2.5.7.linux.tar.gz into the same directory on your system. --- Unpack the files using tar. This will create a directory KASH_2.5 containing among other files the KASH executable called kash. The place where KASH is located in your system is independent of the place where the Alnuth-package is installed. Installing this package ======================= This package is available at http://www.icm.tu-bs.de/ag_algebra/software/assmann/Alnuth in form of a gzipped tar-archive or as an uncompressed tar-archive. There are two ways of installing the package. If you have permission to add files to the installation of GAP 4 on your system you may install the Alnuth-package into the `pkg' subdirectory of the GAP installation tree. If you do not have the permission to do that you may install the Alnuth-package in your private area. In the latter case you need to have a directory named pkg in your private area (for details see 74.1 Installing a GAP Package in the reference manual). --- Now move the alnuth.tar.gz of alnuth.tar file into the directory pkg and unpack it: bash> tar xfz alnuth.tar.gz # for the gzipped tar-archive bash> tar xf alnuth.tar # for the uncompressed tar-archive --- Adjust the path of the executable for KASH The package needs to know where the executable for KASH is. In the default setting Alnuth will check if there is an executable called `kash' in your search path. If you do not want to use the default setting, then there are three other possibilities. If you are able to edit the file `pkg/alnuth/defs.g' you can change the line BindGlobal( "KANTEXEC", Filename( DirectoriesSystemPrograms( ), "kash" )); to something like BindGlobal( "KANTEXEC", "mykash/kash -l mykash/lib" ); where `mykash' needs to be replaced with the directory where KASH was installed. Like always you can also change your personal `.gaprc' file (see 3.4 The .gaprc file) for setting the variable KANTEXEC to a proper value. To do this add the command line mentioned above to `.gaprc'. The third possibility is to change the path to the executable within GAP using one of the two functions `SetKantExecutable' and `SetKantExecutablePermanently'. You will find more detailed expalanations in the manual. Loading and testing the package =============================== To use this package you have to request it explicitly. This is done by calling gap> LoadPackage("alnuth"); Loading Alnuth 2.2.5 ... true gap> Once the package is loaded, it is possible to check the correct installation by running the test suite of the package. gap> ReadPackage( "Alnuth", "tst/testall.g" );