I've never used Mathematica before this week, and I ran into some serious difficulties getting it to work over X11 (off WAM or GLUE).
At first, it would complain on startup that I didn't have the necessary fonts installed. Apparently, Mathematica uses it's own (non-standard) fonts. I found a zip of some BDF fonts which I added to my local font path by doing 'xset +fp /home/chris/BDF/', and that stopped the error messages. Except, when I went to evaluate anything, it would segfault. So then I poked around and found this (outdated) OIT help page on the subject: http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/topics/applications/mathstat/mathematica/161/ the xfs -config command produced an error for me, and I also found the directions a bit unclear (i.e. which machine are they referring to? my local machine or the glue/wam box I'm currently logged into?) Since I needed to get it to work fast for a HW assignment, I simply copied all the fonts from the path given in the OIT help page to my local machine and added that location to my font path. From that point on, everything seemed to work. So, it seems like a decent solution to me. If anyone else has a better way, let me know. Otherwise, perhaps we should ask OIT to update the help page? P.S. When X11 forwarding an application, turn off numlock as it can interfere with certain keystrokes (e.g. carriage return) -- Christopher Conroy
