Neil Zanella asked:

I have just installed installed GAP 3.4.4 on a Red Hat Linux 5.0 system,
Kernel version 2.0.32.
I downloaded the file gap-ibm-i386-linux-gcc2.zoo from the GAP home page
and issued the commands:

unzoo -x gap-ibm-i386-linux-gcc2.zoo
ln -s  gap-ibm-i386-linux-gcc2 gap

and then started GAP with

./gap

and got the following error messgae:

gap: hmm, I cannot find 'lib/init.g', maybe use option '-l <libname>'?
gap>

Is there something else I should have installed?

I'm afraid there is. GAP consists of a kernel (written in C) which does memory
management and certain basic arithmetics, provides the user interface and
interprets the GAP language. Most of the functionality of the system is
provided by the library, which is written in GAP. There are also databases of
algebraic information and contributed "share" packages.

The file gap-ibm-i386-linux-gcc2.zoo simply contains the Linux binary of the
kernel, precompiled to save you the trouble of compiling it yourself. The
error message you saw was the kernel complaining that it could not find the
library.

There are various combinations available for FTP -- the full list is set out on
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~gap/Info/distrib.html

If you have the disk space, then the best thing is probably to FTP
gap3r4p4.zoo (19MB archive, expands to roughly 90MB), otherwise you could start with basic344.zoo (5MB expands to c 20MB), which contains enough to run GAP but leaves out the large share packages and databases.

These archives contain installation instructions.

Steve Linton