I am attempting to install Maxima on Ubuntu 20.04 (on a headless server for use programmatically), but, unlike previous releases which had the graphical interface as a separate additional package, the maxima package in this release now seems to bring in a large number of X and Gnome dependencies.
Is there a way that I can install only the packages needed for the command line version of Maxima, as I would prefer not to bring in a whole X environment on to a headless server unnecessarily?
You can take more control on Maxima installation by using special options to specify that you do not want to get recommended and suggested dependencies:
sudo apt-get install maxima --no-install-suggests --no-install-recommends
For example on minimal 20.04 LTS installation it will result in:
Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Suggested packages: texmacs maxima-doc xmaxima maxima-emacs wish Recommended packages: maxima-share gnuplot-x11 The following NEW packages will be installed: maxima 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 6928 kB of archives. After this operation, 53.5 MB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 maxima amd64 5.43.2-3 [6928 kB] Fetched 2494 kB in 1s (3163 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package maxima. (Reading database ... 62984 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../maxima_5.43.2-3_amd64.deb ... Unpacking maxima (5.43.2-3) ... Setting up maxima (5.43.2-3) ... Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...
Analyzing the above output we can see that gnuplot-x11 may be a reason to install X11 stuff.
