GAP Installation Instructions

The Basic Steps of a GAP Installation

Note that to obtain a fully functional GAP installation you need not only to compile the core system, but also some of its packages. You might want to consider one of the alternative installation methods below which achieve this for you automatically. Otherwise, to install GAP using the source distribution, perform the following steps:

• Choose your preferred archive format and download the corresponding archive.
• Unpack the archive.
• On UNIX, Linux or Mac OS X: compile the GAP core system.
• On UNIX, Linux or Mac OS X: change to the pkg subdirectory and call ../bin/BuildPackages.sh to run the script which will build most of the packages that require compilation (provided sufficiently many libraries, headers and tools are available). If something doesn't work on your system, please refer to the README file provided with the corresponding package.
• On Windows: no compilation is needed, compiled executables for GAP and some packages are already in the win.zip-archive.
• Adjust some links/scripts/icons ..., depending on your system, to make the new version of GAP available to the users of your machine.
• Optional: run a few tests.

For detailed installation instructions for the GAP source distribution on UNIX (which includes the popular variant Linux), on Apple computers under OS X, and on Windows see the INSTALL file, which may also be found in the GAP root directory after unpacking the archive with the GAP distribution.

Optional: GAP starts up much faster using a so called workspace. A workspace can be generated and used as shown in the script CreateWorkspace.sh.

Note that the CreateWorkspace.sh script may require chmod +x CreateWorkspace.sh first.