Folks, I'll apologise straight away for raising a topic which does not really belong here. And my first question is: are there any general CAS discussion groups around any more out there? I currently run Maple and Magma on an Apple G4 Powerbook laptop, which I'm thinking shortly of superseding with maybe a Pro desktop box. What I'm looking for is some guidance about whether this is a good idea from the point of view of maintaining a CAS engine. Bill Gosper previously observed that there were serious issues with all extant systems. Bear with me while I outline a selection of those I labour under at the moment. I use Maple version 9. I daren't ever update Quicktime (Apple video viewer) because newer versions disable the Maple loader (don't ask!). The online Maple help doesn't --- although it did work on a PC I also once used, and it does work on version 10. Version 9 is notoriously glitchy, but the infernal licensing software on version 10 (and 11 presumably) has banjaxed me just before a presentation so often that I flatly refuse ever to have anything to do with it again. Second question: would Maple version 12 on a current Mac be any improvement in these and other respects? I also use Magma. On a modern PC, Magma is seriously fast; on an Apple under OS X 3.9, it is horribly crippled. One reason for this appears to be that the version of gcc (C-compiler) as customised by Apple is unable to compile the GMP multi-precision package used by Magma ... Oh, and by the way, it's a waste of time spending an evening trying to install any gcc updates, because an assembler environment enquiry required is missimg; and the link GNU give for supplying same is broken --- or was last time I tried, and I'm not in any hurry to *$£@?!% well try again ... Third question: have Apple yet managed to install a C compiler which actually compiles GMP? I'd be grateful to hear from any others who have wrestled with such questions in the recent past! Fred Lunnon