GAP Installation Instructions

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 described here which achieve this for you automatically.

Otherwise, please follow the installation instructions for the traditional GAP distribution on UNIX (which includes the popular variant Linux), on Apple computers under Mac OS X, and on Windows. These instructions are contained in the INSTALL file, which may also be found in the GAP root directory after unpacking the archive with the GAP distribution.

You may find useful the shell script InstPackages.sh which builds most of the packages that require compilation on UNIX systems with sufficiently many libraries, headers and tools available (for 32-bit builds on 64-bit machines, use InstPackages32.sh instead). You may just try to run the script or to cut and paste it line by line. If something doesn't work on your system, please, refer to the README file provided with the corresponding package.

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 scripts InstPackages.sh and CreateWorkspace.sh may require a chmod +x InstPackages.sh and chmod +x CreateWorkspace.sh respectively.