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Compiling Maxima from source.

As of 12th April 2024 the following has been used to compile Maxima from source on Linux Ubuntu 22.04.3.

If you compile Maxima from source you must include unicode support. This is essential even if you only use Maxima in English. Students' answers, and teacher's content, increasingly uses unicode which inevitably passes through Maxima.

You will need the following, and GNU autotools

sudo apt-get install texinfo

Download and compile SBCL (Lisp)

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/sbcl/files/sbcl/2.3.2/sbcl-2.3.2-source.tar.bz2
tar -xf sbcl-2.3.2-source.tar.bz2
cd sbcl-2.3.2/
./make-config.sh
./make.sh

sudo ./install.sh

Download and compile Maxima with SBCL

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima/files/Maxima-source/5.47.0-source/maxima-5.47.0.tar.gz 
tar -xzf maxima-5.47.0.tar.gz
cd maxima-5.47.0/

./configure --enable-sbcl

make
sudo make install

By default the above will install Maxima to /usr/local/bin/maxima. You can use the --prefix flag in the call to ./configure to change this. For example, ./configure --prefix=/usr/bin --enable-sbcl, followed by make and sudo make install will install Maxima to /usr/bin/maxima. Optionally, you can use the make check command after make and before sudo make install to check for any issues found from the configuration and build procedures.