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GAP Installation on Macintosh (MacOS)

This page describes the installation of the Mac OS 9 version of GAP.

The Macintosh version also runs in the the Classic environment under Mac OS X, which means that it can be used only on PowerPC based Macs but will not (yet) work for Intel based Macs.

However, we recommend in general that users of Mac OS X install the UNIX version of GAP. This version generally offers better performance, and fully supports the new Intel based Macs.

To install GAP on a Macintosh system follow these steps. It is assumed that you have downloaded the gap4r4p12.zoo and packages-....zoo archives (you must use the .zoo archive for MacOS, other archives do not contain a MacOS binary), as well as the unzoo utility unzoo4r5.sit for MacOS systems. (Otherwise go back to the download description.)

  • Decompress unzoo4r5.sit (using, e. g. , Stuffit Expander). You should now have an application unzoo 4r4 ....

  • Move gap4r4p12.zoo and unzoo 4r4 into the folder in which you want to install GAP and decompress it by dragging the gap4r4p12.zoo file on the unzoo icon. This should create a folder gap4r4. Move the GAP 4 ... application into this folder.

  • Unpack the GAP packages provided by the packages-... archive inside (!) the pkg directory of gap4r4. Note that some packages will not provide their full functionality under MacOS because they need some external background programs, which are not available.

  • Now, please, go back to the operation system independent steps of running some short tests and giving some feedback.