Mathematica and The Wolfram Language are now available from ours and the Raspberry Pi foundation’s software repositories for the default Raspbian Linux distribution for the Pi. If you’re running a Raspbian image provided by the Raspberry Pi foundation, you can now install the software with the following steps:
Ensure that you have at least 600 megabytes of free storage on your Raspberry Pi’s SD card. The package itself will take up 429 megabytes of disk space when installed.
1. Agree to the licensing terms displayed (Use tab to move between fields in the license window. You will only need to do this once).
1. Wait for the installation to complete.
You should now find Mathematica and the Wolfram Language installed on the LXDE desktop under the **Education** menu and the Wolfram Language under the **Programming**
menu.
In order to start the application from the Linux command line, type:
$ wolfram
To start Mathematica, type:
$ mathematica
If you have any questions about installing the application on your Raspberry Pi, feel free to ask!
We have a prerelease program for the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on Linux-ARM (other than Raspberry Pi).
To apply for this program please send email to: prerelease@wolfram.com.
(I believe you have already done this and I have replied to your case privately).
Downloading the Java part took forever (about 3kB/s at times) and even generated errors. However restarting the get-apt several times finally got it down.
Sorry to hear about the difficulties with the Java download. For the initial installation, you’re downloading that file from the Raspberry Pi foundation and not from our servers, so there’s little we can do about the bandwidth. We do host the Wolfram Engine package on our own servers, but the actual configuration for that repository gets added when you do the initial installation from the Raspberry Pi foundation. So, we’ll do our best to make sure you get the package promptly when the first update goes out.
The download/installation process on my RPi was very reasonable. I think the whole process took no more than 5 minutes.
I do have a few questions, though.
The installation put the app start shortcut for the Wolfram Engine in the Education and Programming folders. Should there be an app start shortcut for Mathematica as well? There is none for Mathematica on my RPi. Starting from the command line works fine, though.
When I open an existing notebook from the initial blank notebook, the window system positions the menu bar of the newly opened notebook off the top of my display in the upper left corner. This also happens when I open a notebook from the File Manager. I’ve done nothing to modify the configuration of how this should happen. I can’t get my mouse on top of the menu bar to reposition the window. In order to get access to the menu bar, I have to use Alt-Space to open the window control drop-down that has the Move option. Has anyone else seen this?
Overall, I’m very impressed with how well Wolfram runs on the RPi.
It looks like #1 was fixed with the new Raspbian update. I now have a shortcut for both Wolfram and Mathematica in the Education folder where before I only had Wolfram.
I can’t reproduce #2. What does happen, though, is that after I close the last notebook, there appears to be no way to open a new notebook because there’s no menu bar. Unless I’m missing something obvious, that is. In Mathematica for Windows, there’s a menu bar that remains after the last notebook is closed.
I, too, am really impressed by how well this works on the Raspberry Pi.
[Edit: And I now have been able to reproduce what you describe in #2, too.]
We don’t currently distribute the package as an RPM. It could hypothetically be installed with something like alien, but I’m not sure that it’s distributed with Pidora. If you merely extract the contents of the debian package and place them into your filesystem, you could run the application directly provided it has libatlas3 available to it, but desktop integration like icons might not work as expected.
The easiest way to use Mathematica on the Raspberry Pi today is to use the Raspbian Linux distribution. We haven’t gotten many requests for an RPM package, but it’s something we’re currently considering.
I installed Wolfram and Mathematica on my Raspberry Pi Model B a month or 2 ago and only just now got around to trying it out, and I find that it won’t do a lot of stuff the magazine articles say it should.
(1). It will do stuff like x^y, and N[Pi,1000000]; but won’t do (won’t evaluate them) trig functions and logs.
(2). I tried “Plot3D[Sin[x,y],{x,0,Pi},{y,0,Pi}]” and it replied with:-
“Sin::argx : Sin called with 2 arguments; 1 argument is expected.” (it repeated this 2 more times, followed by:-
“General::stop : Further output of Sin::argx will be suppressed during this calculation.”)
(3). I also tried “Plot3D[Sin[x^3], {x,-2,2}]” and it just repeated it back to me - preceded by "Out[45]= ".
